The Sustainability of ClassWide Peer Tutoring:
An Effective Instructional Intervention
For Students with Disabilities in Inclusive
and Special Education Classroom Settings

ABSTRACT

This proposal describes a research project focused on the contexts that sustain quality use of classwide peer tutoring as an effective instructional intervention for students with disabilities in inclusive and special education classroom settings. For the past 18 years, the Juniper Gardens Children's Project has engaged in a program of research designed to improve the literacy of children in urban and suburban schools who are at-risk, culturally diverse, and who have disabilities. The net product of this research has the ClassWide Peer Tutoring (CWPT) program (Delquadri, Greenwood, Whorton, Carta, & Hall, 1986; Greenwood, Carta, Kamps, & Hall, 1988). This program has been the object of more than 25 experimental evaluations generated by researchers at the Juniper Gardens Children's Project or by others who have replicated or adapted the procedures for classwide and school-wide models. This body of work has shown that students at-risk and with disabilities achieve spelling and reading skills at a faster rate, retain more of what they learn, and make greater advances in social competence when using CWPT compared to traditional instructional methods.

Emerging from this work have been several new knowledge bases that serve this application including: (a) data on instructional effectiveness that includes a 12-year experimental -longitudinal study, (b) the classroom-based CWPT program, (c) a school-wide adoption and administrative model, and (d) technology-based expert system (the CWPT Mentor) for assessing and improving the fidelity of implementation. Collectively, this knowledge base of research represents a significant contribution to facilitating the academic achievement and social competence of culturally diverse children with and without disabilities. Unfortunately, however, we have not investigated the extent to which our CWPT intervention programs are Sustained in project sites beyond the term of time-limited external support and assistance.

All research activities in the proposed project are designed to examine (a) the extent to which CWPT has been shown to be effective and sustained beyond the existence of prior projects; (b) factors (e.g., the nature and adaptations, etc.) that influence the level of sustainability; (c) the type and support strategies employed during initial implementation stages over time; and (d) the extent of consonance or dissonance between existing school policies and issues of sustainability, Using quantitative and qualitative statistical methods, the expected outcome will be a new knowledge base on school and classroom contexts that sustain, quality use of CWPT interventions across multiple sites.

The products of this research will be: research evidence on the effectiveness of CWPT in urban and suburban school districts, new knowledge concerning the sustainability of CWPT interventions in inclusive and special education classroom settings, how to improve CWPT's wider-scale use in classrooms and how to promote effectiveness, utilization, acceptability, and teacher support, and the dissemination of research and practice knowledge to teachers, school administrators, parents, and policymakers at local, state, and federal levels.