Cross-age tutoring and the reading together program

This article presents three related evaluation studies looking at the effectiveness on achievement and motivation of Reading Together, a cross-age peer-tutoring reading program. The effects on tutees, tutors, teachers, and parents were monitored. The advantages of Reading Together began to accrue during the second and third phases of the program. Comparisons to the teaching of reading in the students' regular classrooms were made, and those regular classroom teachers who favored a skills-based approach, as opposed to a whole language or phonics approach recorded the greatest gains for students in the participating group and also for those in the control group.