In a third floor classroom at Russell Conwell Middle School in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, brightly colored math posters hang from the walls and a lengthy description of equivalent ratios covers the white board.
This is what Principal Erica Green calls the HIT classroom — short for high-impact tutoring — where students go for extra help multiple times a week. Around a quarter of the school’s sixth, seventh, and eighth graders participate, Green said.
“They’re getting what they need right here at school to boost their learning and math confidence,” said Green. “We’re seeing more student discourse in the classroom, conversations, them challenging and debating with one another.”
Building students’ math comfort and skills is a major aim of the district’s high-impact tutoring program, which provides support to select students integrated into the school day. The district has hired 65 part-time tutors and plans to spend $6.4 million on tutoring programs from two providers, Saga and Littera, over three years to make a real difference for Philadelphia students, who for decades have lagged far behind average statewide scores on annual tests.
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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.
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