Class Wide Peer Tutoring Program

Class Wide Peer Tutoring (CWPT) was developed during the early 1980s at the Juniper Gardens Children's Project at the University of Kansas, a community-based program devoted to improving the developmental outcomes of children, with or without disabilities, who live in low-income areas. The program addresses both the school and home environments of the children in the program. It is an instructional model based on reciprocal peer tutoring that could be used at any grade level, but has been evaluated primarily for children in kindergarten through sixth grade, with current work being done at the middle school level.

The goal of this program is to improve school performance through reciprocal peer tutoring.

Many controlled experiments have been conducted that demonstrate the effectiveness of Class Wide Peer Tutoring. Most of the experiments have tested the use of the program with minority inner-city students. However, the program has been used with regular education, learning disabled, autistic, and educable mentally retarded students. In all cases, students showed large gains in knowledge as compared with control groups.

The program has been shown to be effective with children as young as first graders and those effects were shown to last for at least three years after students received the training. In addition, the program can be implemented at little or no cost to a school district, so it can be a very useful program for school districts with little funding for extra programs.