Higher Education Institution

Stanford U’s Tutor CoPilot Transforms Real-Time Tutoring with AI-Driven Expert Guidance

Generative AI, including Language Models (LMs), holds the promise to reshape key sectors like education, healthcare, and law, which rely heavily on skilled professionals to navigate complex responsibilities. In education, for instance, effective teacher training with expert feedback is crucial yet costly, limiting opportunities to enhance educational quality on a larger scale.

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PIER Public Seminar Series: High-Impact Tutoring Across Our Decentralized U.S. Education System

Presenter: Susanna Loeb, Professor of Education, Founder & Executive Director, National Student Support Accelerator, Stanford University

Pandemic-induced reductions in learning and school engagement, combined with substantial federal funding, led U.S. schools and school districts to develop a range of new programs for students, many of which were tutoring programs. Policy makers, in response, aimed to create conditions that would enable educators to design and implement these programs successfully. In this dynamic environment, a broad range of stakeholders needed to make decisions impacting students’ educational experiences. They looked for guidance from other states, districts and schools with prior tutoring experiences. While the research evidence on tutoring summarizing and analyzing these experiences was unusually strong, it almost exclusively focused on in-person tutoring with pre-pandemic technologies and instructional contexts. It also only lightly touched on the key issues of design and implementation. This fast-turnaround research project has aimed over the past four years to provide the range of decision makers with insights into effectiveness and implementation of tutoring programs to help them make real-time decisions, accelerate learning, and address the substantial inequities in access to quality educational experiences between demographic groups. In partnership with districts across the country, the project has produced insights about tutoring, while also highlighting both the advantages and disadvantages of conducting research during transition times to inform decisions across contexts. The project provides a model for considering the connections among decision makers and policy influencers looking to invest in and promote promising solutions, education leaders who are willing to try new things, refine, and learn, and researchers working quickly and in partnership to evaluate and provide insights.

This Is a Critical Moment for High-Impact Tutoring. Don’t Give up on It

High-impact tutoring has the strongest evidence base of any approach for improving student learning, and contributes to increased engagement and attendance. As far as proven education solutions go, it’s a pretty darn good one, and has rightfully been a bipartisan priority since the pandemic. 

But federal pandemic relief money that helped fuel the expansion of such programs dried up in September, and recent research has sparked debates about the high-impact tutoring’s effectiveness when implemented at scale. This includes an evaluation of Metro Nashville Public Schools’ tutoring program that reported small gains for students and a meta-analysis of large high-impact tutoring programs that showed challenges in maintaining evidence-based practices

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What Happens When an AI Assistant Helps the Tutor, Instead of the Student

An AI-powered tutoring assistant increased human tutors’ capacity to help students through math problems and improved students’ performance in math, according to a Stanford University study.

The digital tool, Tutor CoPilot, was created by Stanford researchers to guide tutors, especially novices, in their interactions with students.

The study is the first randomized controlled trial to examine a human-AI partnership in live tutoring, according to the researchers. The study examines whether the tool is effective for improving tutors’ skills and students’ math learning.

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Biden-Harris Administration Exceeds Goal of Recruiting 250,000 New Tutors, Mentors, and Student Success and Postsecondary Transition Coaches Across the Country

At a White House event today, Domestic Policy Advisor Neera Tanden, in coordination with the U.S. Department of Education (Department), AmeriCorps, and the Everyone Graduates Center at the Johns Hopkins University, will announce that the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS) has exceeded President Biden’s call to recruit an additional 250,000 adults into high-impact student roles by summer 2025 to support academic success for all students. These roles range from tutors, mentors, student success coaches, postsecondary transition coaches, and wraparound/integrated student support coordinators. As of the end of the 2023-2024 school year, an additional 320,000 adults have stepped into these roles in schools, exceeding the President’s goal and doing so a year early. 

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Study: AI-Assisted Tutoring Boosts Students’ Math Skills

An AI-powered digital tutoring assistant designed by Stanford University researchers shows modest promise at improving students’ short-term performance in math, suggesting that the best use of artificial intelligence in virtual tutoring for now might be in supporting, not supplanting, human instructors.

The open-source tool, which researchers say other educators can recreate and integrate into their tutoring systems, made the human tutors slightly more effective. And the weakest tutors became nearly as effective as their more highly-rated peers, according to a study released Monday

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Tutored by Teachers Awarded Tutoring Program Design Badge from National Student Support Accelerator

Tutored by Teachers ("TbT"), a leading provider of personalized virtual instruction, has been awarded the prestigious Tutoring Program Design Badge from the National Student Support Accelerator ("NSSA"). This recognition highlights TbT's commitment to maintaining rigorous standards in tutor selection, program efficacy, and school partnerships. It also supports the company's ongoing expansion as TbT introduces new instructional supports designed to meet the evolving needs of diverse student populations.

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California students need more diverse teachers; let’s close the gap with tutors

You can’t argue with dataResearch shows that high-dosage tutoring is one of the most effective ways to help students make academic progress. Yet few students actually receive itA recent study from Stanford University demonstrated the many positive effects of tutoring, including increased reading and math scores, attendance and a feeling of belonging. Teach For America’s (TFA) tutoring program, the Ignite Fellowship, finds and develops tutors who connect virtually with students during the school day. Fellows, who are paid for their work, are supported by a school-based veteran educator to customize instruction. Seventy-one percent of the 3,500 students across the country being tutored by Ignite fellows meet their semester-long reading and math goals.

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