1. Make the student interested.
2. Improve the student's skills.
Of course the student is uninterested and has low skills when you start out. Otherwise there wouldn't be much of a point to the activity.
You might argue that it's not the tutor's job to make the student interested, but it is. The primary thing that sets good tutors apart from bad ones is their ability to motivate their students. To care. To fiendishly ask questions that are just out of reach of the students ability, or will reveal some tiny flaw in the students understanding. This type of thing engages everyone when done well.
(I did have a source for this but I seem to have lost it. That is a shame because it was a really good article.)
What you are describing is out of range for peer tutoring (child-to-child) which is what I was thinking of. For children, the motivation for the task doesn't need to come from the subject matter itself, the very fact that a friend/peer is working with you can be all the motivation you need.
Which is why literally this whole setup where you have good students tutoring weak ones is a trap and punishment for the good one.
Expecting well behaved kid to be that emphatetic mind reading tutor is waaay beyond age appropriate expectations and abilities of typical kid.
Nowhere did I state I expected any expert tutors from children. I merely said that something, anything at all, is better than nothing. It might not even be better in all cases, but on average, the evidence tells us it is.
Plus, this is your attitude toward kid tutoring another kid: as a tutor, you have exactly two jobs: Make the student interested. Improve the student's skills. And you have this expectation placed on a kid.
> I merely said that something, anything at all, is better than nothing.
That something is to put responsibility on a kid and then blame a kid for not tutoring well enough it it fails. And I am telling you that it is unfair to punish the good kid by doing this. Because this plan is not caring about the "good" kid at at all.
As someone who was a kid in that position, no it did not increased my skill in thing I was supposed to teach at all. That might happen when you are teaching interested peer at similar level, does not happen when you are teaching someone uninterested and someone who has much lower skills.
> For example, toddlers learn primarily by mimicking their parents, replicating their behaviour.
That body of knowledge wears off after you are like 3. Then explicit teaching by parents and other adults becomes much more prominent. And even toddlers are explicit taught a lot.
> Very bad analogy. Yes, for almost all skills, just doing them improves your proficiency.
Only up to the pretty low level for most people and most activities. After that, you reach a plateau.