Tutoring Organization
How is ChatGPT impacting schools, really? Stanford researchers aim to find out
A new collaboration between Stanford’s SCALE and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, strives to better understand how students and teachers use the popular AI platform and how it impacts learning
Education is one of the fastest-growing use cases of AI products. Students log on for writing assistance, brainstorming, image creation, and more. Teachers tap into tools like attendance trackers, get curriculum support to design learning materials, and much more.
Yet despite the rapid growth – and potential – a substantial gap remains in knowledge about the efficacy of these tools to support learning.
A new research project from the Generative AI for Education Hub at SCALE, an initiative of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, aims to help fill that gap by studying how ChatGPT is used in K-12 education. In particular, the research will examine how secondary level teachers and students use ChatGPT.
How Portland Public Schools can afford to offer high-impact tutoring
“We have a lot of work to do,” Hudson said, which is why the 43,500-student district has zeroed in on providing high-impact tutoring.
Joined by Stanford University’s Nancy Waymack, Soto and Hudson shared what Portland has learned from its efforts during a July 12 session at UNITED, the National Conference on School Leadership.
High-impact tutoring is a data-driven service that is embedded into the school day and uses consistent, well-supported tutors, said Waymack, director of research, partnerships and policy for Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator. The tutors use high-quality instructional materials and hold sessions at least three times a week in small groups of no more than four students, she said.
The Impact of High-Impact Tutoring on Student Attendance: Evidence from a State Initiative
This study provides compelling evidence that tutoring can do more than boost test scores; it can actually get students back in the classroom. On average, students were 1.2 percentage points less likely to be absent on days when they were scheduled to receive tutoring, suggesting that they are motivated to participate in tutoring. This impact was even greater for middle schoolers and students who’d missed more than 30% of school days the prior year. The study also found that the design matters: tutoring only improved attendance when it combined at least two evidence-based features like small groups, frequent sessions, and in-school delivery.
The Key Resource of Time: Master Schedules and Effective Allocation of Students and Educators
A central challenge facing education leaders is allocating limited resources in pursuit of their priorities. Three of their critical resources are time, money, and people. A school's master schedule reflects the allocation of all three of these critical resources and ultimately determines the educational opportunities available to students. A school’s schedule dictates who will be teaching them, what they will be learning, where this learning will take place, and how much instruction they will receive.
2024-25 Snapshot of State Tutoring Policies
Over the past three school years, districts and states have worked to recover the academic ground they lost over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and chip away at stubborn gaps in academic performance. Many turned to high-impact tutoring, a research-based approach to providing individualized instruction to students. In the School Pulse Panel Survey in October, 2024, 78% of responding schools reported having some type of tutoring for students and 37% reported offering high-dosage tutoring or what we refer to as high-impact tutoring.
Implementation of the OSSE High Impact Tutoring Initiative - School Year 2023 – 2024 Second Year Report
The second full school year (2023-24) of the OSSE High Impact Tutoring Initiative expanded the reach of an already ambitious program. The Initiative served 7,274 students, approximately 8% of students in DC schools and 12% of students classified at-risk. The Initiative was able to increase participation by 2,000 students from its first year of implementation while also increasing the successful targeting of at-risk students who stand to benefit most from the program. The Initiative also increased the average dosage level to 33.86 sessions. Collectively, this is a significant improvement in program scale and program delivery, ensuring that increases in tutoring continue to serve students who are most in need of potential benefits.
Tutoring Giant’s Sudden Demise Linked to End of Federal Relief Funds
FEV Tutor further evolved last year when it announced a new AI-enhanced platform, Tutor CoPilot. The tool makes tutors more effective by giving them guiding questions to ask students. In a randomized trial, the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University, which studies tutoring models, found that when less-experienced tutors used the AI support, student math scores increased an average of 9 percentage points.
Stanford initiative helps scale what works in education
Over the past couple of years, scaling well-researched solutions has been shown to also counter the negative effects of the pandemic, Loeb said, from widening achievement gaps and missed school time, to poorer social and emotional development. Her team recently launched the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) to address educational inequities resulting from the pandemic. NSSA conducts research on the most promising tutoring practices and works with district leaders and others to provide research-backed guidance on implementing high-impact tutoring.
“Our students deserve this work,” Loeb said. “From our research, we learn so much about how to engage students and accelerate their learning. The practical, easy-to-use learnings from research need to reach decision makers so that our students can benefit.”
Tips by Text and NSSA are part of SCALE, Loeb’s new initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, a university-wide effort addressing some of the most challenging issues in education through research, partnerships, and technological innovation.
2023-2024 Wittenberg University High-Impact Tutoring Program Implementation Report
In recent years, school districts across the U.S. have invested in high-impact tutoring as a promising approach to accelerate K12 student learning. Such efforts to scale tutoring have focused on design elements proven to be the most effective on student outcomes, namely consistent instruction from a trained tutor, integration with classroom instruction, tutoring informed by data, using quality curricula, and occurring at least three times per week (Nickow et al., 2024). Studies indicate that effective tutoring programs share these core characteristics, even while they vary in the types of tutors they employ, scheduling strategy, and in-person or virtual delivery model (Cortes et al., 2024; Robinson et al., 2024).