Students: Learning by Doing

When one below-average student tries to teach another, both improve far more than they would under normal schooling conditions. So at least has been the experience of Manhattan’s antipoverty Mobilization for Youth program, which three years ago set up a “homework helpers” project that paired high school students as after-hours reading tutors with academically backward grade-school children, most of them Negroes and Puerto Ricans from the city’s depressed Lower East Side. Since top students could not always be found as “role models” who might inspire the younger children to greater industry, M.F.Y. was forced to take on a number of tutors who were themselves below average in educational skills.

As it turned out, the high school students did even more learning than the children they were hired to teach. According to a study conducted by Columbia University, a sampling of the 2,000 tutored youngsters advanced an average of six months in reading ability during one five-month period; their untutored classmates improved by only 3½ months. But 100 tutors who were tested—many of them below eighth-grade standards in reading skills—picked up an average of 3½ years in reading ability. Faced with the responsibility of helping younger children, teen-agers with a previous record of hostile indifference to schooling were transformed into alert, highly motivated students. Matilda Medina, 18, who was two years below average in reading, went up ten points in her English grade as a result of teaching others, and now has college ambitions. “I put more effort into studying now—I know better what’s really important in life,” she says.