The prescription was everywhere as the full extent of academic damage wrought by the pandemic first became clear: Set up tutoring programs to catch students up.
The same advice echoed from policy papers, think tanks, and the federal government, which put hundreds of billions into school recovery dollars. Experts and researchers heralded tutoring as an evidence-backed solution for addressing significant academic gaps, and some school systems saw early successes.
Now, though, several evaluations of pandemic-era tutoring programs are showing smaller effects on student progress than expected—or revealing that didn’t improve outcomes at all.
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.
“There is a lot of potential upside to findings like this, even though we wish that students were seeing more across-the-board gains as soon as possible,” she said
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