Tutoring Organization

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.

Braintrust academic interventions are ESSA-certified, hold a National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) Design Badge, and are designed in collaboration with leading experts in structured literacy, the Science of Reading, and the Science of Math. Braintrust Tutors is a national provider supporting more than 100 districts across 21+ states, including New York City Public Schools, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, LAUSD, and the District of Columbia. Through tailored implementation models, certified educators, rigorous diagnostics, and a sophisticated data and reporting platform, Braintrust delivers measurable student growth and meaningful transparency for schools, districts, and families.

High-impact tutoring has emerged as one form that researchers have shown actually works — when done well.

Stanford University researchers have found that high-impact tutoring works when it is embedded into the school day, happens at least three times per week in small groups, and matches the same tutors with students as much as possible. The Stanford researchers also found that tutoring is most effective when schools use data to identify students’ needs, and when tutoring materials align with research-backed and state standards.

A new study by Stanford researchers Hsiaolin Hsieh, David Gormley, Carly D. Robinson, and Susanna Loeb suggests why one-on-one tutoring has been found to produce double the gains in student learning than two-on-one tutoring.

Analyzing 16,629 transcripts from 2022-23 school year tutoring sessions from an earlier study that established the greater gains under one-on-one tutoring, the researchers examined how tutors allocated their time and attention across both one-on-one and two-on-one formats. The tutoring sessions focused on early literacy and served kindergarten through second grade students, with 510 students receiving one-on-one tutoring and 570 students receiving two-on-one tutoring. All students met with their tutor online for 20 minutes during the school day, four times per week.

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.