Decades of research have found that tutoring can substantially improve student achievement. The most effective programs — defined as "high-impact tutoring" — show impacts as large as a year of learning.
Yet despite school districts investing upwards of $7.5 billion on tutoring between 2021 and 2024, and arguments for the effectiveness of tutoring as an intervention, results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed little overall change in students' reading skills and only small upticks in math compared to 2022. And while small-scale, randomized controlled trials have consistently found sizable benefits of tutoring on student learning, broader studies examining tutoring implemented under real-world conditions at scale have found much smaller and often null effects.
The latest findings from a national study conducted by the University of Chicago and MDRC bring this challenge into a new light. During the 2023-24 school year, researchers examined in-person, virtual, and computer-assisted high-impact tutoring in eight large U.S. school districts, reaching over 17,000 students. Impacts were smaller than earlier meta-analyses, ranging from .06 to .09 standard deviations on standardized test scores — the equivalent of one to two months of learning.
Upon deeper review, however, these findings leave room for optimism. First, researchers found that lower-cost virtual tutoring models — approximately $1,200/student — were just as impactful as in-person models at $2,000/student, suggesting that tutoring can be less expensive without sacrificing impact.
Second, these findings highlight what's possible when students receivetutoring that comes closer to the definition of "high-impact." For example, the effect of tutoring was largest — about 3.5 months of learning — in a New Mexico district where students received more than 2,000 minutes of tutoring per year. Across all districts in the study, this amount most closely aligned with the recommendations for implementing a high-impact model.
The takeaway? As districts and states nationwide invest in tutoring, it remains one of the best tools in our educational toolkit, yielding positive impacts on student learning at scale. But to maximize return on investment, both financially and academically, we must focus on improving implementation. Here are five questions schools and districts should ask.
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