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04/10/2024. Article
When Muriel Bowser, the mayor of the District of Columbia, announced in early March that her administration had carved out $4.8 million for “high impact tutoring” in its 2024-25 budget, she was met with thunderous applause.
Bowser had made the announcement to a room packed with administrators, tutoring service providers and policy analysts. But the excitement was tempered somewhat by questions about how far these funds would go: Is this appropriation enough? What about tutoring in the next year?
As the federal stimulus package—ESSER—winds down, states are racing against the clock to find other sustainable funding sources to keep tutoring alive in their schools. So far, states have taken a patchwork approach. Some states are creating policies that would embed tutoring as a service; other states have relied on one-time grants.
04/10/2024. Article
Educators are eager to launch high-impact tutoring, however, they also reported that improvements were needed to ensure tutors focused on the interventions most needed by students.
Most K12 leaders would agree that high-dosage tutoring is now a key part of instruction. Most would also note difficulties with finding adequate space and funding, hiring high-quality tutors and encouraging students to attend.
Those hurdles and, more importantly, the solutions are explained by Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator in a new study of a large urban district and a charter system. The strategies identified should help administrators scale successful tutoring programs to help more students stay on track, the report’s authors contend.
04/01/2024. Article
This support element includes different approaches to tutoring; competency-based instruction where students advance based on what they know rather than age; summer school; effective use of student time on task; and linking tutor vendor payments with student outcomes like attendance, and academic learning can improve learning and accountability for results. High-dosage tutoring is an especially effective strategy for achieving significant academic improvements. The National Student Support Accelerator, a program at Stanford, is a recognized source of information for this work.
03/01/2024. Article
High-quality tutoring programs not only get students up to speed in reading and math, they can also reduce absenteeism, a new study shows.
Focused on schools in Washington, D.C., the preliminary results show middle school students attended an additional three days and those in the elementary grades improved their attendance by two days when they received tutoring during regular school hours.
But high-impact tutoring —defined as at least 90 minutes a week with the same tutor, spread over multiple sessions — had the greatest impact on students who missed 30% or more of the prior school year. Their attendance improved by at least five days, according to the study from the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford University-based center that conducts tutoring research.
02/27/2024. Article
Students were less likely to be absent on days when they had a scheduled tutoring session, according to study by National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University.
PALO ALTO, C.A., March 1, 2024 – Schools nationwide are grappling with significant challenges related to student absenteeism. In response, D.C. schools along with many other states and school districts have implemented strategies ranging from texting interventions to home visits. D.C. schools have also prioritized mitigating pandemic-related learning losses through the widespread adoption of high-impact tutoring programs. High-impact tutoring seeks to develop strong relationships between students and their tutors in order to increase student motivation and engagement in their academic coursework, but could also benefit attendance.
12/18/2023. Article
"We're pretty clear on the big picture about what makes tutoring work, and it is focused on intensive, relationship-based, individualized instruction," said Kathy Bendheim, managing director of the National Student Support Accelerator. After-school tutoring has spotty attendance records, she said, and on-call, web-based tutoring may not be tailored to the student or used very frequently, either.
12/07/2023. Article
Transformative change in education often begins with a powerful story. Increasingly, high-impact tutoring is that story, where students find both significant academic success and personal confidence in their abilities. Rhyne Richards—a 6th-grade student in Washington, DC.—met several times each week with a tutor, Ms. Burns, to overcome math challenges. Rhyne’s journey speaks volumes. “I get distracted a lot [in class],” Rhyne admitted. “But when I’m with Ms. Burns, I learn a lot; a lot more than I knew last year.” It’s a testament to the remarkable impact of intensive, one-on-one tutoring. “I’m proud of myself,” Rhyne continued. “Before, I didn’t really know math like I do now. But now I can do it myself. I want to be the smartest person in the world.” Rhyne’s regained confidence in math and optimism for the future epitomize the profound evidence for and influence of intensive, relationship-based, individualized instruction—it is a narrative we must tirelessly work to replicate and scale.
11/23/2023. Article
“A lot of districts really want to provide additional support for their students. They want to do it in an equitable way and they want to do it in a sustainable way. One of the things that we’ve seen is that starting big and not being able to do [tutoring implementation] smoothly sometimes backfires,” said Nancy Waymack, director of research partnerships and policy for the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University, which studies K-12 tutoring trends. “Starting by focusing on a smaller group of students, and really making sure that they have the full support of a consistent tutor, on a very frequent basis, in a data-driven way that’s really aligned with the curriculum is a way that’s going to work really well.”
10/23/2023. Article
In a hopeful sign for early literacy gains, K-2 students who received individual virtual tutoring during the 2022-23 school year showed higher reading test scores than their peers by the end of the year, according to a study released Wednesday by a tutoring research program at Stanford University.
The study, which analyzed 2,085 students across 12 Texas charter schools, found students using 1:1 or 2:1 virtual tutoring services performed 1.57 percentile points higher.
While the study found positive signs that the online tutoring model boosted reading comprehension for younger students, researchers acknowledged the outcomes from virtual tutoring are “more modest” than from similar in-person tutoring programs.
09/27/2023. Article
Districts across the nation use Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) to target appropriate supports for each student. High-impact tutoring is the most effective research-backed academic support – consistently demonstrating from six months to over two years of learning gains for students across grade levels and content areas in a single year of tutoring.
Districts that have chosen to integrate high-impact tutoring with MTSS are finding that embedding this highly effective support into the fabric of their schools improves student outcomes, reduces implementation challenges, improves instructional coherence, and streamlines operations.
09/27/2023. Article
With research showing that far fewer students took advantage of online tutoring than districts expected, the outcomes-based model is one way to ensure districts use public funds wisely. “In education, we can pay for things a long time before we realize no children are participating in it,” Miller said.
08/15/2023. Article
As the main focus of Future Forward Ohio, high-dosage tutoring, which is characterized by an average of at least 90 minutes of tutoring per week, promises lasting academic improvements. Studies have shown that students consistently benefit from it, as evidenced by Stanford University's National Student Support Accelerator, which underscores its effectiveness, particularly for those lagging academically.
"Cignition's program aligns with what the research tells us are the most promising practices in high-impact tutoring, with consistent, effective tutors who develop strong relationships with students and provide engaging, personalized instruction," said Susanna Loeb, professor and director of the education policy initiative at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. "Moreover, recent studies provide good evidence that Cignition's program has been successful for the students that they reach, meaningfully improving their learning and performance on key assessments."
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.
04/24/2023. 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
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
02/09/2023. Article
The latest installment also provided a detailed look at schools’ efforts to implement high-dosage tutoring, which Stanford University researcher Susanna Loeb called the “best approach that we know for accelerating students’ learning” because it offers students help from “an adult who knows them, cares about them and has the tools to address their needs.”
She has been tracking the implementation of large-scale tutoring efforts across the country as part of the National Student Support Accelerator and called the survey results “the most comprehensive information out there” on how schools are addressing learning loss.
12/15/2022. Article
“Online tutoring doesn’t have to mean after-school tutoring; it doesn’t have to mean opt-in tutoring,” said Susanna Loeb, the director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, which has produced research on effective tutoring practices. “It really can be very similar [to in-person tutoring].”
10/29/2022. Article
Tutoring is one of the most popular strategies for helping students catch up in the wake of the pandemic. But cost, staffing, and scheduling challenges often make it hard for schools to get these programs off the ground.
A sweeping $10 million research effort announced Thursday aims to tackle that problem by studying 31 different tutoring initiatives across the country this school year. The goal is to answer some of the biggest open questions about how schools can put successful tutoring programs in place for more students — and then figure out if they worked.
10/28/2022. Article
In a recent study, we report on the implementation of opt-in, on-demand tutoring in partnership with the Aspire Public Schools (a charter management organization, or CMO) in California. The CMO provided 7,000 middle and high school students with free, unlimited access to one-on-one chat-based tutoring during the spring 2021 semester. Students accessed the program from a mobile device and could request help from an available tutor in any core subject. The topic of each tutoring session was usually driven by student questions and the interaction between tutors and students were chat-based with help from a virtual whiteboard to facilitate joint work.
06/14/2022. Article
Yes! We have much work to do to ensure high-impact tutoring is embedded in schools for all students for the long term, but we see places where it is happening. Here are three examples of high-impact tutoring programs that have been serving students for over a decade before the pandemic and continue to grow.