The COVID pandemic severely damaged the academic achievement of American schoolchildren.
According to a vast majority of teachers and education scholars, the rapid and dramatic shift from in-class to online instruction was largely responsible for months of academic backsliding among America’s K-12 school children. Most teachers agree that pandemic-induced online learning approaches were an unmitigated disaster especially for children from lower-income families.
By the time the pandemic was over, elementary and middle-school students, on average, lost the equivalent of half-a-year of learning in math and a third of a year in reading. Equally troubling was the fact that chronic achievement gaps between white/Asian and non-white students grew even larger during this period.
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Notably, research by Susanna Loeb (Stanford University) revealed that tutoring methods and strategies can vary dramatically both in their design features and student outcomes. Loeb’s team of researchers discovered that in particular “high impact” tutoring strategies have demonstrated statistically significant effects on student learning in math and reading. High impact tutoring contains the following features:
- One-on-one tutoring (or with very small groups)
- Tutoring content is aligned with in-class instruction
- Students receive tutoring at least three times per week from the same tutor
- Tutors are professionally trained
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