Higher Education Institution

In Massachusetts, first graders who spent 15 minutes a day online with a tutor from Ignite Reading stayed on track a year later without additional tutoring, according to data shared exclusively with The 74. Students gained, on average, at least five additional months of learning over their expected growth. 

Another virtual program, Hoot Reading, produced positive results in the Kansas City, Missouri, schools. Students who received one-on-one tutoring from certified teachers made greater progress than those who didn’t receive the extra help, new data shows. 

“Virtual models are getting stronger,” said Amanda Neitzel, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of the Ignite Reading study. “If you go back just a few years, we had no examples of evidence-proven models and now we are getting them.”

A second study conducted by researchers at Stanford University examined a different model: Tutor CoPilot, an AI-tool designed to provide guidance to tutors during chat-based tutoring sessions. Different from LearnLM, which gives the supervising tutor only one suggested response, Tutor CoPilot gives tutors three suggested responses that tutors can choose from, edit, or regenerate. In a study conducted between March and May 2024, 1,000 elementary school students were randomly assigned to chat-based sessions with either a human tutor alone or a human tutor using Tutor CoPilot.

Students in the Tutor CoPilot condition were four percentage points more likely to achieve topic mastery than students assigned to human tutors, with the largest gains (up to 9 points) among students assigned to lower-rated and less-experienced tutors. The researchers suggest that these improvements were likely driven by the use of higher-quality instructional practices—tutors using CoPilot were 10 percentage points more likely to prompt students to explain their thinking, while tutors in the control condition were more likely to rely on generic encouragement.

High-quality tutoring has emerged as an important post-pandemic strategy for helping struggling students in public schools. Research finds that tutoring often results in substantial additional learning gains when delivered during the school day, in small groups with the same tutors and multiple times a week for at least 10 weeks. 

But this often comes with a substantial price tag — depending on the model and staffing approach, costs can range from $1,200 to $2,500 per student per year. During the pandemic, many districts relied on federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds to launch or expand tutoring programs, but these have largely expired.

Stanford’s National Student Support Accelerator ran the largest randomized trial to date. Researchers embedded tutor co-pilot systems within 900 tutors serving 1,800 students. Overall mastery rose four percentage points over control groups. Moreover, students paired with lower-rated tutors gained nine points. World Bank teams replicated positive effects in Nigerian secondary English classes. The AI assistant there delivered 0.31 standard deviation growth within six weeks. Consequently, analysts equated the short program to almost two years of schooling.

Susanna Loeb is named to the 2026 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, ranking the 200 university-based scholars in the United States who had the biggest impact on educational practice and policy last year.

The most recent of these, from researchers at Stanford University’s SCALE Initiative, examined math and reading tutoring programs in a large, urban district during the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years. Neither led to overall gains in academic achievement.

But when researchers dug deeper into the data, they identified implementation problems that could be driving these null effects.

The findings add to a growing body of evidence around tutoring in a post-COVID landscape that suggests the effectiveness of a program hinges on the nitty-gritty details of how it is run—how often students meet with their tutors, for instance, or whether lessons are tailored to their specific needs.

Studying these implementation details could help school systems build more effective tutoring initiatives in the long run, said Elizabeth Huffaker, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Florida, and the lead author on the SCALE paper.

The report concludes that four years after the height of the pandemic, there is widespread use of evidence-based and people-powered student supports–such as high-intensity tutoring, mentoring, student success coaching, postsecondary transition coaching, and wraparound supports–in public schools across the United States. But, public school principals indicate that continued growth in these interventions is needed to meet the scale of student needs.

The report emphasizes that while implementation barriers exist to expanding evidence-based programs, there is a subset of schools that are proving that serving students at scale is possible, and outlines a range of resources and opportunities to support expansion of high-quality programs.