UNIVERSITY ACADEMIC ADVISING AND TUTORING DELIVERED BY PEERS

Higher Education is facing many challenges. On one hand, the student body is itself becoming more diverse in age, experience level, motivation, and learning need; on the other hand, institutions are facing growing resources constrains, rapid technological advancements, demographic changes, and a growing demand for accessibility and equity. Along this process colleges and universities have been called upon to address these challenges by focusing more intentionally and systematically on undergraduate programs in terms of student retention and academic outcomes. In this sense, the aim of this study was to determine the efficacy of a peer tutoring program to improve the learning strategies and motivation, social skills and academic achievement of university students. The sample was composed by 100 first year students (50 experimental group and 50 control group) and 41 students from last year and postgraduate level from Pharmacy, Psychology, Economics and Business at the University of Granada. The dependent variables learning strategies and motivation, social skills and academic achievement were measured by the Motivated Strategies Learning Questionnaire (Pintrich, Smith, García & Mckeachie, 1991), Social skills scale (Gismero, 2000) and Academic Report, respectively. After selecting and constructing the necessary instruments to gather all demographic and academic relevant information from the sample, and assigning the students to either the experimental or control group, the intervention consisted of 15 tutoring sessions highly structured delivered by Tutors, after receiving themselves 3 sessions of training on tutoring. The results show statistically significant differences in favour of the experimental group on learning strategies and motivation, social skills and academic achievement, and also statistically significant pre-post differences for the tutors on learning strategies and motivation, and social skills.