Peer+and+Cross-Age+Tutoring

It is likely that peer and cross-age tutoring have been part of human existence since huntergatherer times. As Jenkins and Jenkins write, "Tutorial instruction (parents teaching their offspring how to make a fire and to hunt and adolescents instructing younger siblings about edible berries and roots) was probably the first pedagogy among primitive societies" (1987, p. 64). Wagner, on the other hand, traces the historical origins of peer tutoring in Western civilization back to Greece in the first century A.D. and through Rome, Germany, other European locales, and finally America (1990). Topping's history dates the formalized use of peer tutoring back to the 1700s (1988, pp. 12-18). Other academics trace peer tutoring back to the "Monitorial System" of the early nineteenth century (Bland and Harris 1989, p. 142).