COLLEGE STUDENTS' SATISFACTIONS AND PERCEPTIONS ABOUT LEARNING ACHIEVEMENT ON PEER TUTORING PROGRAM

Abstract

Peer tutoring program was introduced and developed as an extracurricular program of helping college students improve their efficiency and effectiveness in learning. The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences of satisfactions and perceptions of achievement by gender, grade, and major in peer tutoring program for university students. The subjects were 140 students attended to the peer tutoring program during three semesters of 2010 and 2011 at Chung-Ang university in Korea. The peer tutoring program was proceeded as step of organization of tutoring team, orientation, learning activity for 15 weeks, discussion with their adviser, submitting of reflective report and its sharing, evaluation and final report meeting. The survey tool was developed by the authors based on literature research and expert review. The questionnaires consisted of questions to identify general features of the students, satisfactions and perceptions of learning achievement on peer tutoring programs. The validity of the tool was examined by exploratory factor analysis and the data were analyzed by t-test. Results can be summarized as follows: First, there was no signifiant differences by gender and major(student major: humanities & social sciences, natural sciences & engineering) in satisfactions and perceptions of learning achievement. Second, according to the different grade groups(low-grade means 1st & 2nd grade students, high-grade means 3rd & 4th grade students), statistically significant differences were found in the satisfactions and perceptions of learning achievement. The high-grade students were significantly higher than the low-grade students in the satisfactions and perceptions of learning achievement. In particular, the high-grade students were more satisfied than the low-grade students in learning contents and methods acquired through tutoring. The high-grade students were found to be more satisfied than the low-grade students on tutoring program process. The high-grade students' perceptions on the improvement of their academic performance(task, test, project, etc.) through tutoring program were relatively high than the low-grade students. From the results, it is suggested that peer tutoring program need to organize and coordinate by effective group composition based on characteristics of students. The manager of peer tutoring program also provide can a tutoring guide by considering characteristics of students. This study is expected to be utilized as a basic reference for promoting and developing peer tutoring programs in higher education.