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Learning, preparation for gainful employment, career advancement, and development into responsible citizens are some of the overarching goals of university education for students. Peer-assisted learning has emerged as an essential pedagogy in university education as students seek to meet the demand of their studies. This has evolved from the unofficial interaction between students to a tool recognized, encouraged, and implemented by many universities based on its merits (Huijser, Kimmins, & Evans, 2008; Schuetz et al., 2017). Learning is known to be maximized when the process focuses directly on what the learner wants to learn as opposed to what the teacher wants to teach. Therefore, student-centered learning allows individual students to take responsibility for the accumulation of personal skills and knowledge. This form of collaborative learning is beneficial to all participants in terms of cognitive gains and positive learning outcomes (Osman, Sauid, & Azizan, 2015). The student-centered learning that is characteristic of peer-assisted learning complement the formal mode of learning.
Peer-assisted learning refers to situations where students support each other academically through teaching and learning from each other. Peer-assisted learning has been explained from the five meta-spaces in the concept of 'spaces of influence' covering aspects of cognitive and social congruence. The core elements of PAL include collaboration, reflection, communication, self-and peer assessment (Boud, Cohen, & Sampson, 2016). The implementation of such initiatives is sometimes labeled Peer-Assisted Student Support (PASS) or Supplemental Instruction (SI) among others (Packham & Miller, 2000). These schemes address three elements of student need: engaging learning experience, practical and timely support services, and a sense of community.
Peer-assisted learning can happen in a variety of ways. It can also cut across formal, informal learning clusters. The development of domain-specific peer-assisted learning digital models has interested learning scientists and teacher education researchers for a while (Latifi, Noroozi, Hatami, & Biemans, 2019; Noroozi & Mulder, 2017; Noroozi, Weinberger, Biemans, Mulder, & Chizari, 2013). Such efforts have covered aspects of understanding the cognitive models that are involved in giving and receiving peer feedback (Nicol, Thomson, & Breslin, 2014), types of feedbacks (Bayerlein, 2014; Latifi et al., 2019), the role of gender (Noroozi et al., 2020), change in attitude (Huisman, Saab, van Driel, & van den Broek, 2018), and the contribution such feedbacks make on the students’ essay writing skills and learning in general(Noroozi, Biemans, & Mulder, 2016; Noroozi, Kirschner, Biemans, & Mulder, 2018). In many of these studies, peer feedbacks were received/given via a digital platform.
There are also instances where a face-to-face peer-assisted learning scheme has been offered to students as a free and voluntary learning support option under peer-tutoring experiments. In such programmes, a pool of tutors (students) is recruited based on the recommendation of faculty staff, paid, trained, and provided with instructional materials. With these supports, participation, effectiveness, quality, and cost of the programme can be monitored. The role of the tutor and tutee can be either fixed or flipped depending on the variance of the programme being implemented (Miravet, Ciges, & García, 2014). Notwithstanding, the programme remains flexible, collaborative, interactive, intentional, systemic, and mutually beneficial. These programmes were a low-cost initiative to increase student participation in peer-assisted learning in general(Kim, Jillapali, & Boyd, 2021), and reduced the failure rate (Pugatch & Wilson, 2018). However, even the meager cost for such a programme could be a limitation to its implementation where there are budget constraints.