Peer-Mediated Reading and Writing in a Digital, Multimodal Environment

The goals for engaging students in peer learning range from positioning students as knowledgeable others to promoting social-emotional learning goals to providing contexts in which students can articulate and compare their thinking to supporting opportunities to cogenerate solutions to complex problems. There are a number of complexities associated with orchestrating productive peer learning. We illustrate the application of these findings in experimental research we are conducting in which 6th-grade students, heterogeneous with regard to academic achievement, collaborate in pairs using digital devices that provide opportunities for them to interact with and create multimodal representations as they engage in scientific reasoning. We use empirical research to demonstrate the application of the peer tutoring literature to collaborative learning contexts to raise new questions for researchers who study peer tutoring.