PEER LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A THEORETICAL REVIEW IN MATHEMATICS

The current educational model requires a higher implication by the students in all aspects of their education. One of the methodologies that fosters this way of understanding the teaching-learning process is peer tutoring. Peer tutoring is a strategy in which, people from similar social groupings who are not professional teachers help each other to learn and learn themselves by teaching (Topping, 1996) [5]. There are different reviews which propose categories related with peer tutoring. On one hand, Goodland and Hirst (1989) [2] propose the terms Surrogate Teaching, Procting, Co-tutoring and Teacherless groups. On the other hand. Falchikov (2001) [3] distinguishes among Peer Assessment, Peer Feedback, Peer Learning, Peer Teaching and Peer Tutoring. Inside this last term he differentiates a series of techniques that may be carried out, such as Cooperative note-taking pairs, Peer Coaching Peer Monitoring or Think pair share and think pair square. In the same way, Boud, Sampson and Cohen (2001) [1] point out a series of strategies that employ peer helping as a learning tool: Learning partnerships, Learning one on one in which by means of temporary meetings some mates help others with their learning process, Study groups, Student-led workshops and Learning exchanges. As we can see, there is great variety of methods that use peer learning as a teaching proposal. There are a lot of High Education institutions that carry out this type of initiatives with very positive results. The goal of this work is to review the scientific literature regarding peer tutoring in mathematics in higher education and, specifically, analyzing the positive effects that it has. We have focused on the Mathematics area due to the fact that we consider it as one of the most problematic for the college students, especially during their first years. To this end, a research was conducted in the main databases (Eric, Google Scholar and Apa, PsycNet) and the following descriptors were indicated: peer tutoring, peer learning, mathematics, university, college and higher education. 25 experiences were found. All of them share a common aspect: taking advantage of the students potential to help each others, which is known as peer power. From all the reviewed researches and experiences we can conclude that peer learning may offer a great improving line in higher education, using the capacities of the students to offer pedagogic support to learn from each other and turning classrooms and university centers into learning communities in which students learn from their differences under a teacher's guidance (Duran y Coll, 2015) [29].