News
- | The 74
With tools like Amira and Khanmigo, ‘the take-up is very low,’ according to Stanford University’s Susanna Loeb.
Wendy Graham’s two kids first encountered Amira, a popular artificial intelligence tutoring platform, in 2025, during a summer reading program in New Mexico. She also used it at home with her daughter, now a fourth grader.
To help educators navigate the AI tutoring landscape, the National Student Support Accelerator and the AI Hub for Education at Stanford’s SCALE Initiative recently published a research brief examining the current research on the effectiveness of using AI in tutoring.
As schools deal with an uncertain funding environment, they might consider using AI tutoring to reduce costs, and “we wanted to make a more actionable tool for education system leaders on what the evidence says about AI tutoring,” said Chris Agnew, the director of the AI Hub for Education, which researches AI’s impact on student learning.
Part of the challenge with researching the effectiveness of AI tutoring is that the term could refer to a wide range of tutoring models, Agnew said.
- | The 74
Artificial intelligence-based tutoring programs promise something schools have long struggled to provide: personalized instruction for every student at a fraction of the cost of traditional 1-on-1 tutoring.
But for that promise to be fulfilled, students have to use the AI tools. New research suggests that may be much harder to achieve than schools assume.
In a paper describing the results of randomized controlled trials led by the Stanford SCALE Initiative, 355 students in grades 1 to 5 in two school districts were assigned either to use an AI literacy tutor independently or to use the same platform with support from a human tutor. In both, the goal was to improve reading achievement.
Intensive tutoring is supposed to be one of the most effective routes to raise student achievement. But it doesn’t always work out that way.
While meta-analyses of studies on high-dosage tutoring programs find big, positive impacts on learning, it’s often challenging for districts to implement these time- and labor-intensive initiatives in practice. Recent studies of post-pandemic tutoring programs have shown smaller-than-expected gains, or even no student improvement at all.
Could a lighter touch tutoring program be easier for schools to maintain, and still move the needle on student achievement? One new study suggests yes.
The paper comes from researchers at the National Student Support Accelerator, a program of the SCALE Initiative at Stanford University that studies high-impact tutoring. They tested a tutoring intervention called Chapter One, in which part-time tutors delivered 5-10 minute lessons throughout the school day, while students were still in their regular classrooms.
- | The 74
The end of Varsity Tutors for Schools follows the abrupt termination of another large provider, FEV Tutor, in early 2025 as relief funds dried up. But tutoring experts say this shutdown is not just another example of districts running out of extra federal money. In fact, multiple states, like Louisiana and Massachusetts, now provide ongoing funding for high-impact tutoring, including virtual models. With districts increasingly demanding strong results, Varsity Tutors for Schools, they say, wasn’t able to deliver proof that their services increased student performance.
For-profit providers, like Nerdy, have to answer to investors and shareholders. But regardless of the business model, those “that adhere closely to the research are going to be the ones that are more likely to have stronger outcomes,” said Kathy Bendheim, strategic advising director at the National Student Support Accelerator, a tutoring research center at Stanford University.
- | PRWeb
A collaboration between four national education organizations – the Partnership for Student Success, the New Jersey Tutoring Corps, the National Student Support Accelerator, and the Pathways Alliance – announced the official approval of the National Guideline Standards (NGS) for Tutor Apprenticeship Programs by the U.S. Department of Labor. This landmark approval provides a crucial new resource to strengthen educator pipelines through high-quality, workforce-aligned tutoring.
- | Forbes
High-impact tutoring (HIT), or high-dosage tutoring, is widely endorsed by educational leaders, advocates, and researchers to help improve outcomes for students. HIT is defined by several key components, all of which have been employed by Read Alliance since its inception (and long before the terminology of “high-impact tutoring” or “high-dosage tutoring” was defined and in use):
- Frequent (3+ times per week)
- Small group size (no more than four students per tutor, with one-to-one tutoring as the preferred model)
- Targeted instruction focused on specific skills or learning gaps, and designed to complement classroom instruction
- Led by trained instructors who receive ongoing support and oversight
- Consistent tutor-student relationship that fosters a strong connection over time
These components are largely attributed to Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA), in which Read Alliance (READ) is listed as a vetted provider which means the READ model meets their standards for excellence widely recognized as the “stamp of approval” for HIT programming.
In two districts analyzed by Stanford University, students’ average weekly use of one such tutor was 2.18 minutes and 5.23 minutes, respectively.
Dive Brief:
- As multiple states prepare or have already implemented artificial intelligence tutoring pilot programs, a new Stanford University study found that merely offering AI tutoring tools to students is not enough to create meaningful engagement and improve reading outcomes.
- Among two student groups studied, only about 61% in one school district and 53% in another used the AI tutor even when there was scheduled time to use the tool, according to the research released Wednesday. Overall, students’ average weekly usage amounted to 2.18 minutes and 5.23 minutes for each district, respectively.
- When students used the AI tutoring platform alongside a human tutor, student engagement slightly increased by one minute per week in one district and by 4.4 minutes per week in the other. Still, the researchers said that difference does little to fulfill the 30 minutes of weekly use recommended by the platform provider for measurable reading gains.
- | The 74
Ed tech companies routinely pitch AI tutoring platforms as a way to deliver personalized instruction at a scale that no human teacher can match. But when researchers from Stanford University looked at how much students actually used one major AI platform, something startling happened: Students didn’t use it that much at all.
In the study, published Wednesday, two unnamed school districts carved out dedicated time for hundreds of elementary school students to work with a well-known AI reading tutor, either during class time or after school. Researchers followed about 350 students across two randomized controlled trials. All of the students were expected to log on for at least two 30-minute sessions a week.
A group of Stanford University researchers started with one question: Could a human tutor providing motivation and support get students to spend more time working with an AI literacy tutor?
The answer turned out be yes — but only between one and four minutes more per week. Many students never logged on at all.
That left the researchers with a different set of questions.
“A key finding that we weren’t even meaning to test is that having access to this AI tutor isn’t the same as using it,” said Carly Robinson, the lead author on the study released Wednesday and the director of research for the SCALE Initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.