News
Get the insights you need on getting the most out of tutoring programs, how tutoring can help with learning recovery, connecting students with tutoring services, how districts can introduce and scale up tutoring, and recent efforts to improve the recruitment of tutors.
“Online tutoring doesn’t have to mean after-school tutoring; it doesn’t have to mean opt-in tutoring,” said Susanna Loeb, the director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, which has produced research on effective tutoring practices. “It really can be very similar [to in-person tutoring].”
“High-impact tutoring is a relationship-based tutoring. It relies on an adult to understand a student, understand their needs, be there to celebrate successes with them, be there to support them.” Susanna Loeb
The Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University reports that supplementing classroom instruction with high-impact tutoring “leads to substantial learning gains for students.” However, a variety of factors can influence the way educational institutions need to implement tutoring programs. To illustrate how schools or districts can customize a tutoring program to meet their specific needs, FEV Tutor has published a white paper titled “High-Impact Online Tutoring for Academic Success: An Afterschool Implementation.”
Research released last month seems to back that up. In California’s Aspire charter school network, only 1 in 5 of the middle and high school students in the study used Paper in spring 2021. But higher-achieving students were almost twice as likely to use the platform than students who’d gotten at least one D or F the prior semester — the exact students the charter network had hired Paper to help.
- | EdSource
OnYourMark, a non-profit virtual tutoring program designed to equip students in grades K-2 with foundational literacy skills, today announced it has been awarded $250,000 in competitive grant funding. OnYourMark is serving 1,200 students across multiple schools at Uplift Education in the Dallas/Fort Worth region. This funding will support OnYourMark's collaboration with the National Student Support Accelerator to understand how tutor-to-student ratios impact student learning.
Additionally, the Annenberg Institute at Brown University will study the lessons learned from RIDE’s work and other states to create a policy report on how to develop a replicable, state-level model for scaling and sustaining high-impact tutoring. High-impact tutoring, also known as “high-dosage tutoring,” involves tutoring a consistent group of students multiple times a week and has been shown to have a dramatic impact on accelerating student learning.
Tutoring is one of the most popular strategies for helping students catch up in the wake of the pandemic. But cost, staffing, and scheduling challenges often make it hard for schools to get these programs off the ground.
A sweeping $10 million research effort announced Thursday aims to tackle that problem by studying 31 different tutoring initiatives across the country this school year. The goal is to answer some of the biggest open questions about how schools can put successful tutoring programs in place for more students — and then figure out if they worked.