In large urban communities, teachers find it difficult to provide appropriate education to individual students due to large-sized class, and they should spend many time on guidance, task evaluation and work handling in addition to academic guidance. I...
In large urban communities, teachers find it difficult to provide appropriate education to individual students due to large-sized class, and they should spend many time on guidance, task evaluation and work handling in addition to academic guidance. In elementary mathematics, arithmetic is the basis of mathematics, and a lack of an ability of handling the four sort of operation leads to larger academic deficiencies. There is a growing gap between students who can handle the arithmetic and others who can't, and the latter get to view mathematics unfavorably. Hence the kinds of teaching-learning strategies that aim at fixing the cognitive deficiency and affective wound of mathematically retarded students should be developed to provide them with successful intervention.
The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of self-instruction programs combined with peer tutoring on mathematically retarded children's ability of handling the arithmetic and their self-efficacy in an effort to justify the educational significance of self-instruction programs in elementary education.
The subjects in this study were 21 children in S elementary school in Seoul, who included 14 mathematics underachievers and seven peer tutors. An experimental group that was going to get self-instruction programs combined with peer tutoring was organized with 14 children involving seven math underachievers and seven peer tutors. The control group that was going to undergo self-instruction programs by teachers was made up of seven math underachievers. To confirm the equivalency of the two groups, t-test was utilized.
The instruments used to select the children were a mathematics achievement test and the personal intelligence test of K-WISC III. To evaluate the effect of self-instruction programs combined with peer tutoring, pretest and posttest were conducted to assess their ability of handling the arithmetic and self-efficacy.
After the pretest was carried out, one-on-one guidance was provided in the experimental group by the peer tutors about the arithmetic by applying self-instruction programs in 12 sessions. In the control group, a teacher taught every member in group by applying self-instruction programs. And then both groups took a posttest, and the collected data were analyzed with SPSS 12.0 program and t-test.
The findings of the study were as follows:
Both groups showed an improvement in the ability of handling the arithmetic after self-instruction programs was provided. But the experimental group underwent a more significant change than the control group. In terms of self-efficacy, the experimental group got much better scores on the posttest, whereas the control group just showed a rise of very small scores. And the experimental group made better progress in self-efficacy than the control group. The findings suggested that self-instruction programs combined with peer tutoring had a positive impact on the math underachieving children's ability of handling arithmetic, and that it served to boost the general academic self-efficacy of the mathematically retarded children as well.
Self-instruction programs combined with peer tutoring can be counted among effective teaching strategies that serve to bolster mathematics under- achieving children's ability of handling the arithmetic and self-efficacy in large-sized class. If self-instruction program is added by systematic peer tutoring geared toward mathematically retraded children in typical classroom situations, that will make it possible to improve their academic achievement in various regards.