Teaching Peers An Effective Learning Tool For Students, Studies Show

Education Week (10/28, Sparks) reported, "Educators have long held that peer tutoring can help students learn, and emerging research on students working with computer characters points to one possible reason why: Teaching begets learning for the teacher, too. Researchers at Stanford University's AAA Lab and Vanderbilt University's Teachable Agents Group call it the 'protégé effect,' which posits that students will work harder, reason better, and ultimately understand more by learning to teach someone else-even a virtual 'teachable agent'-than they will when learning for themselves." Education Week noted that both "labs are moving to bring the lessons from virtual teaching to flesh-and-blood classrooms."