Children Helping Children

There has been a recognition for a very long time of the potential value of children as helpers of other children in educational settings, and over the past two decades there has been a steady growth in the development of structured same-age and cross-age peer tutoring programmes.

Many such programmes have been developed for highly specific educational purposes such as teaching children with reading disabilities or other particular deficits and their application is still by no means widespread. Outside the classroom, however, peer helping relationships have received minimal attention.

Yet there clearly are other vitally important contexts for studying the impact of peer relations. This is essentially a review book and it is designed to reflect the state of research at the present time.

The bulk of the chapters indicate a clear bias towards educational applications.

The aim of the book is to bring together in a single volume some of the most influential thinking and research in these various fields.