In fall 2020, a group of nationally recognized education experts launched the National Student Support Accelerator. In March 2021, we unveiled the Accelerator website with open-source tools and resources for tutoring organizations, schools, and districts that are easy to use, downloadable, and designed to make structuring, implementing and scaling high-impact tutoring programs as straightforward as possible.
To date the Accelerator has:
- Synthesized tutoring research into a Research Agenda including two sets of Priority Research Questions – Characteristics of Effective Tutoring and Scaling Tutoring to focus future research and issued a brief How to Gather Rigorous Evidence of Your Program’s Effectiveness
- Led the development of a set of Tutoring Quality Standards and an accompanying Tutor Quality Improvement System that provides both a self and validated assessment tool for tutoring programs to understand their level of alignment to standards and provides recommendations and materials for improvement.
- Released tools for practitioners, schools, districts and states to more easily create or improve high-impact tutoring efforts including
- Toolkit for Tutoring with supporting webinars designed to make it easy for tutoring organizations and districts to develop or improve their own High-Impact Tutoring program,
- District Playbook designed to make it easy for districts to design or partner with a provider to adopt High-Impact Tutoring across their district,
- Tutoring Database providing a searchable source for districts to identify potential tutoring provider partners and
- Cost Calculator to support districts and other educational institutions in understanding the costs of High-Impact Tutoring.
- Issued informational briefs including High-Impact Tutoring: Equitable and Effective Learning Acceleration, Policy Considerations for Tutoring, Using the American Rescue Plan Act Funding for High-Impact Tutoring
- Developed research partnerships across the nation to learn more about implementation challenges and solutions and effectiveness of tutoring program features;
- Provided strategic advising to a variety of thought leaders, practitioners, state and district leaders, and other decision makers including over 20,000 participants in High-Impact Tutoring webinars ; and
- Created a Tutoring Educator Advisory Group to ensure tools and materials meet the needs of educators in the classroom.
Currently, we are:
- Building a community amongst education leaders across the nation to learn from each other and more effectively implement high-impact tutoring;
- Providing materials and assistance to states, districts, tutoring organizations, and advocacy organizations to support their high-impact tutoring efforts;
- Continuing to add to tools and information briefs to make it easier to adopt and/or expand high-impact tutoring;
- Continuing to share new research results that allows this highly effective, relationship-based, individualized instruction to become more sustainable and embedded in our public education system for the long run.
As a result of this and other’s work, states such as Illinois, Texas, Colorado, Tennessee, and others are launching and expanding high-impact tutoring, thousands of education leaders understand the research and characteristics of high-impact tutoring, and new research across the country is focusing on learning more about how to make high-impact tutoring more effective, less costly, and easier to implement.
As we continue our work to increase access to high-impact tutoring to students in need, we encourage you to join us by getting involved!