We are a research group affiliated with the Education Sciences Institute at the Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona (UAB), in Catalonia (Spain), which constitutes a meeting point for professionals working in different Catalan schools and universities, coming from several disciplines within science and social science (teaching, biology, psychology, psychopedagogy and nursing.

We are committed to the study, practice and spread of the concepts, theories and practices of peer learning: collaboration, cooperative learning and peer tutoring. As a group, we are commited to such activities as carrying out teacher education, conducting school projects, producing papers and other forms of communication, and participating in MA and other postgraduate and MA programs.

We understand the concept peers to refer to people who occupy a similar social status, where none of them behave as a professional teacher towards the others. In this sense, we are concerned about cooperative learning considering pupils, teachers, members of the same family or others such as those working as volunteers.

At present, we are involved in different projects related to peer learning:

“Llegim en parella” (reading in pairs) is a peer tutoring programme for primary school children that uses a structured method and family involvement, and has yielded gains in reading comprehension. We are carrying out research to monitor and evaluate the process and the results obtained in the network of ten schools involved in the project. 

“Let me learn with my peer” is a peer tutoring project involving collaboration between Scotland and Catalonia with the aim of improving both first and second language proficiency in English and Spanish. Children at primary school age act as tutors in their own language and tutees in their second language using a website specially designed for this project. We are expecting to find that children learn both ways, when they act as tutors and as tutees.

“Cooperative team work with the aid of computers” is a project that is carried out in secondary schools where pupils work cooperatively using computers. The aim of the project is that students learn to value information from different kind of texts, determining the veracity of the contents.

More information (about the group, the members, our projects, interesting links, etc.) is to be found in our website http://antalya.uab.es/ice/aprenentatgeentreiguals/

David Duran David.duran@uab.cat http://antalya.uab.es/ice/aprenentatgeentreiguals

Departament de Psicologia de l'Educació  Facultat de Ciències de l'Educació, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona  Despatx 254 (G-6). Tel. 93 581 26 78 08193 Bellaterra (Catalunya)