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05/31/2023. Article
Developing and staffing the kind of tutoring that research has shown is most effective—often referred to as high quality, or high-impact tutoring—is complex, time-consuming, and expensive. Tutors meet with students at least three times a week, in small groups or one-on-one. Work should be targeted to a specific subject and aligned to high-quality curriculum, and should develop strong tutor-tutee relationships.
“High-impact tutoring is not homework help. They’re not sporadically dropping in,” said Carly Robinson, a senior researcher at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education who works with the National Student Support Accelerator, a group promoting research-based tutoring programs.
05/28/2023. Legislation
Offers $30 million Learning Acceleration Grants for Virginia families. Approved families will receive $1,500 for tutoring in English, math, science, history, and foreign languages. Grants can also be used for speech pathology and reading intervention. Any student meeting Virginia’s school-age requirements and attending a public, private, parochial, or homeschool qualify. Students whose family income is at 300% or less of the federal poverty level are eligible to receive $3,000 in grant money.
05/28/2023. Legislation
Provides intensive tutoring in math to students in grades 6-9. The Connecticut State Department of Education is allocating $10 million to this initiative which it hopes to launch for the 2023-24 school year. The goal of this initiative is to recover from pandemic learning loss by implementing research-backed practices such as high-dosage tutoring. To participate, school districts will apply for grant funding. Approved schools will choose from a list of pre-chosen tutoring providers.
05/28/2023. Legislation
Reallocates $34.7 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds to LEARNS Act initiatives. $8.5 million will go to supplemental education such as tutoring and $20 million will go toward high-impact tutoring. The remaining funds will go to literary coaches. The LEARNS Act is a broad bill passed in March 2023 that changes many parts of Arkansas’ education system.
05/18/2023. Article
“The truth is that there are a lot of scabbed knees and bruises in this work,” Borders, who oversees the state’s tutoring effort, said at a conference held last week at Stanford University about the future of tutoring. “Not going to sugar coat this, guys. It’s hard work.”
Early in the pandemic, experts identified high-dosage tutoring — the kind that’s offered multiple times per week, in small groups, with a consistent tutor — as a potentially successful strategy for helping students plug learning gaps. But more than two years into a national push to expand the reach of tutoring, many schools are still struggling with basics, like how to staff and schedule their programs.
04/28/2023. Legislation
Creates three grant programs to help school districts pay for K-3 reading tutoring as well as other supports for improved literacy. The Bill is sponsored by a group of bipartisan lawmakers and has been unanimously approved by the House Committee on Education, moving it to the Joint Ways & Means Committee. The bill aims to improve Oregon literacy rates and follows the nationwide movement towards reading instruction backed by and known as “the science of reading.”
04/28/2023. Legislation
Funds learning recovery initiatives. The State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond announced the availability of $4 billion in funding for intensive tutoring, additional instructional time, accelerated learning strategies, early literacy intervention, and other learning supports. This is the second disbursement of funds, following one of $4 billion in November 2022. The funds are intended to aid in pandemic learning loss.
04/27/2023. Article
Of all academic interventions, so-called “high-dosage” tutoring has shown the most evidence of helping students gain academic ground quickly.
Susanna Loeb, the founder and executive director of the National Student Support Accelerator, studies how schools can use and scale up intensive tutoring, which involves one-on-one situations or very small groups meeting at least 30 minutes, three or more times a week.
Loeb, who is also a professor and the director of the education policy initiative at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, spoke with Education Week about what goes into effective tutoring.
04/25/2023. Article
High-quality tutoring is one of the most effective educational interventions we have – but we need both humans and technology for it to work. In a standing-room-only session, GSE Professor Susanna Loeb, a faculty lead at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, spoke alongside school district superintendents on the value of high-impact tutoring. The most important factors in effective tutoring, she said, are (1) the tutor has data on specific areas where the student needs support, (2) the tutor has high-quality materials and training, and (3) there is a positive, trusting relationship between the tutor and student. New technologies, including AI, can make the first and second elements much easier – but they will never be able to replace human adults in the relational piece, which is crucial to student engagement and motivation.
04/24/2023. Event
Join this invitation-only gathering of researchers, district, state, and higher education leaders, tutoring providers, and funders to:
Learn about implications of recent research findings and innovative and sustainable practices in tutoring;
Explore successful state and district strategies for scaling and sustainability; and
Make connections with education leaders in the field.
04/24/2023. Article
Providing students with tutoring in addition to in-class learning time is an oft-prescribed remedy for both catching up students who are behind and accelerating students who are capable of even higher performance. Two common sticking points to providing that remedy are finding additional time in the day, week, or year for the intervention and finding enough qualified personnel. A new study from the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) evaluates a promising program that could reduce both of these sticking points to manageable levels.
04/17/2023. Article
A short-burst, in-person 1:1 tutoring model has shown significant gains in early literacy for kindergarten students, according to research presented Thursday by Carly Robinson, a senior researcher at Stanford University and a member of the National Student Support Accelerator, at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting in Chicago.
04/13/2023. Article
Pearl, the leading research-based tutor management platform, announced today insights from its inaugural Community
04/04/2023. Article
A two-year grant of $1,000,000 to the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA), a program devoted to translating research on how tutoring can benefit students into action. This grant will strengthen the high-impact tutoring ecosystem by supporting NSSA in disseminating research on what makes tutoring programs effective to state and local education agencies, ensuring that evidence-based tutoring reaches the students who need it most.
03/31/2023. Legislation
Provides qualifying families with a $500 credit that can be used to pay for after school enrichment programs that will support learning for students impacted by COVID-19. The credit will be paid directly to vendors from the state. Qualified activities include tutoring, language classes, and music classes. On April 6, 2023, anyone living in an EdChoice school district will qualify for the credit without any income qualifications.
03/31/2023. Legislation
Launches High Impact Tutoring (HIT) and RAPID Professional Development Programs. The tutoring and professional development programs focus on evidence-based practices and are aimed at closing learning gaps that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. The $17 million for HIT comes from Governor’s Emergency Education Relief (GEER) Fund. The programs will prioritize elementary-aged students because research has shown they have the highest need following the pandemic. The NJ Department of Education is currently seeking tutoring vendors to partner with for this program.
03/29/2023. Article
“Portland is probably doing the right thing by starting small and getting it right,” Loeb said. “Using your own teachers can be effective and easier to implement since the teachers are well versed in what the students should be learning and they likely already know the students.”
Critically, though, structuring the program this way could limit the district’s ability to scale it up, Loeb added. That’s a particular concern given the millions of dollars in federal pandemic relief money that has to be spent or returned by September 2024.
03/27/2023. Article
With “proper supports, such as good materials and coaching, they can be excellent tutors,” said Stanford professor Susanna Loeb, who founded the National Student Support Accelerator to expand access to high-quality tutoring.
03/23/2023. General
The content and design of this Resource Library draws on insights from interviews with tutoring program directors, teachers, math directors, STEM directors and other math leaders, as well as from a literature review of peer-reviewed journal articles on math teaching, tutoring, and equitable teaching practices.
The goal of this guide is to provide resources to help tutoring programs provide effective math tutoring for students in need.
03/22/2023. General
This Playbook aims to support HEIs in partnering with school districts to offer high-impact tutoring services. While HEI staff members are the primary audience, state educational officials, school district staff, and school administrators can leverage many of the resources in the Playbook.
03/20/2023. Article
Are you a college or university leader looking to improve opportunities for your students?
Or maybe you are a district leader looking to partner with a college or university to provide tutoring for your students?
The National Student Support Accelerator’s High Impact Tutoring: Higher Education Institution Playbook supports higher education institutions in partnering with school districts to offer high-impact tutoring services.
03/15/2023. Article
“These results are big,” said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford professor of education who was a member of the research team and heads the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford research organization that studies tutoring and released this study in February 2023. “What’s so exciting about this study is it shows that you can get a lot of the benefits of high impact tutoring – relationship-based, individualized instruction with really strong instructional materials – at a cost that is doable for most districts in the long run.”
03/08/2023. Article
Having partnered with multiple state, university and district-led community-tutoring programs, Pearl is developing the nation’s most diverse dataset in the tutoring industry. The platform is foundational for managing and scaling hybrid tutoring through evidence-based best practices and collaborates with the Annenberg Institute at Brown University and its National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) to safely gather data to continuously improve program design and measurably accelerate student outcomes.
03/06/2023. Article
“Tutoring is one of the most promising approaches for accelerating student learning and reducing educational disparities,” according to a working paper of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.
However, there is still little data on which programs are most effective, studies show.
Even when tutoring is available, struggling students are far less likely to opt in than their more-engaged and higher-achieving peers, the Annenberg paper also found.
02/28/2023. Article
"I do think that as districts have success in tutoring, and see student learning ... then they’ll start to think more about how they embed it, and link it more deeply to the rest of the work they’re doing in schools." Susanna Loeb, founder and executive director, National Student Support Accelerator
02/18/2023. Legislation
Provides a $28 million grant to extend the New York Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness Program (NY GEAR UP). This grant has been awarded to New York for four consecutive years and has served more than 6,200 students. The program supports students in low-income communities with tutoring, college and career advisement, mentoring, and college-related services from 7th grade through their college freshman year. The grant will be housed in colleges and universities across New York State and will be responsible for recruiting, hiring, and training college students to serve as tutors.