Exploring the Usage of Token Economy and Peer Review to Select Lab Assistants and Tutors For Computer Science Courses

Lab assistants and tutors for computer science courses are usually student workers, selected by faculties, to teach a single student or a very small group of students to facilitate their learning. They are essential resources from which students can obtain individualized help. The screening and selection of such student workers has traditionally been done by faculty members without enough consideration of the inputs from students or without a formal process to quantify and qualify student inputs, which we believe, otherwise, can greatly help improve the selection process in terms of efficacy and accuracy. In this paper, we introduce an idea to address this issue by using a student-centered approach incorporating a token economy to select lab assistants and tutors. We think that this idea applies not only to CS courses but also to courses from other disciplines where there is a need for hiring effective student workers to help their peers learn well.