Early literacy tutoring and children’s reading trajectories: Evidence from a four-year randomized controlled trial

Bibliographic Data

Authors
Jilli Jung, Carly D. Robinson, Tye Ripma, Kalena E. Cortes, Karen Kortecamp, Susanna Loeb
Year of Study
2026
Publication
EdWorkingPapers.com
https://doi.org/10.26300/g7sg-m495

Most evidence on early literacy tutoring comes from intensive one-year interventions. Much less is known about whether schools can sustain individualized instructional support as students’ reading needs evolve across the early grades. We present findings from a four-year randomized controlled trial evaluating Chapter One, an adaptive instructional support system designed to translate the instructional principles underlying effective tutoring into a scalable model for early literacy. We randomly assigned 815 kindergarten students in a large urban district in the Southeast to Chapter One or business-as-usual instruction and followed them through 3rd grade. Students assigned to Chapter One scored 0.12 to 0.17 standard deviations higher on state-administered reading assessments across grades 1 through 3, although the third-grade estimate is imprecise. They were also less likely to have an individualized education program (IEP) or be retained by the end of the study. The reduction in IEP status was concentrated among students who already had an IEP at baseline. The estimated longitudinal effects on reading are smaller than those typically reported for intensive tutoring models but were achieved under ordinary school staffing, scheduling, budget, and student mobility constraints. The findings suggest that schools can translate the instructional principles underlying effective tutoring into adaptive instructional support systems that improve students’ reading trajectories and academic progression while remaining feasible to sustain across the learning-to-read years.

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  Media Mentions

| Education Week

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.

Researchers followed students as the district ran the program for four years, from kindergarten through 3rd grade.

The program didn’t require the district to hire additional staff or change their schedule to allow for blocks of tutoring throughout the day. It cost about $416 per student per year, less than half as much as other intensive tutoring models that were implemented elsewhere in the country at the same time.

Still, students made progress. Those who had been randomly assigned to the tutoring group scored higher than their peers on state standardized tests in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades. By the end of the four years, the tutoring group was also less likely to have an individualized education program or be retained.

“There is a lot of evidence saying that intensive tutoring works if implementation is good. But implementation is very difficult,” said Jilli Jung, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, and the lead author on the study.

This lower-lift model of tutoring could offer a practical way for districts to support students across multiple years, she said.

The test score gains in this study are smaller than those in other recent studies of high-dosage tutoring interventions—between 0.12 and 0.17 standard deviations, compared with 0.29 standard deviations in a 2024 meta-analysis, for example.

“It’s harder to expect large effects when the intervention is small, but a lot easier to implement,” said Jung. Still, the improvements in this study are meaningful, in part because they’re more feasible for most schools, she said.

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