Exploring the impact of peer tutoring on student learning: How do students perceive the use of peer-tutoring in learning science literature?

Abstract

This paper has been written as a pre-study of how students at a master level in industrial design and
packaging logistics will perceive an assignment about peer tutoring knowledge from scientific
journal articles and popular science literature. The study is being performed by teachers in the
Packaging Logistics, MTTN35 course and the Industrial Design Project I, IDEN05 at the Faculty of
Engineering, Lund University. Both courses are focused on projects that the students work on,
either individually or in smaller groups and the literature assignment are one of several assignments
in both courses. There has been an observation by the teachers in both courses that many of their
students prefer more hands-on practical assignments and the students seems to be unused to the
format of literature studies; how to present knowledge from literature and how to use it in their
projects. The reason for introducing peer tutoring for the literature assignment in both courses has
been an intention by the teachers to make the students more interested in literature studies and to
give them a deeper understanding for the relevance of using scientific literature in their work. The
intention of using peer-tutoring in smaller groups or pairs, in comparison to individual literature
reading, is to give the students an opportunity to discuss and help each other to use literature as a
source of information and inspiration for their projects. Hence the underlying teaching and learning
question for this paper and the coming study has been: How do students perceive the use of peertutoring
of science literature as a part of project based learning?
This study will be followed up by an evaluation of the peer tutored assignment after the courses has
been completed. The authors of this paper have used literature as inspiration for how to design the
task and how to evaluate the result. The literature study has also given an insight in what advantages
and disadvantages could be expected.