Student

Mays pointed to the move to focus federal pandemic relief money on tutoring programs whose design showed evidence of effectiveness, such as individual or very small groups, and using an aligned curriculum in sessions at least three times a week. This model differed from tutoring provided under the No Child Left Behind Act’s supplemental education services, which were repeatedly found to have no benefit for student achievement—in part because programs varied significantly from district to district.

As excitement grows around tutoring as a strategy to combat learning loss, advocates have rightly been encouraged by the growing body of evidence demonstrating the efficacy of tutoring interventions. To date, however, little research has examined the impact of fully virtual tutoring on very young students. Hardly a technicality, this distinction matters because younger children are less likely to have the technical and self-regulation skills upon which virtual learning depends. Now, a new study by researchers from Stanford, Vanderbilt, and UnboundED analyzes the benefits of virtual tutoring specifically for early elementary students.

Less than a third of Colorado eighth-graders score proficiently in math. So, Colorado has invested heavily in high-impact tutoring programs — $20 million allocated in federal and state dollars since the pandemic. Colorado was also one of five states to get a $1 million grant from Accelerate, a nonprofit that aims to make 

Regardless of the potential hiccups along the way, data has shown that colleges and universities are beginning to tap more into Federal Work-Study funds to hire tutors, said Nancy Waymack, director of research partnerships and policy at Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator, a nonprofit research organization that promotes high-impact tutoring in schools.  

For Waymack, it’s refreshing to see students earn pay for tutoring considering the role has historically been viewed as a volunteering opportunity.

“Using Work-Study, using AmeriCorps funds, other federal resources or resources that come from other places to pay tutors just opens up the field a lot more for many different students who otherwise might have been doing another job on campus,” Waymack said. “And they wouldn’t have that opportunity to be in a school, work with kids, and see educators who are teaching every day that they might want to emulate somewhere down the road.”

Funding is the biggest barrier to tutoring in schools, says Alvin Makori, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education. Makori co-authored a research paper about the challenges to schools offering tutor services at scale. The paper — based on surveys of teachers at charter and public schools in California — also noted concerns about tutor quality and trouble finding the space and time to work tutoring into the school day as problem areas for the schools it inspected. (The study did not look at virtual high-dose tutoring, of the kind provided by some of the organizations discussed here.)