In-person tutoring has been shown to improve academic achievement. Fewer studies have examined the impact of virtual tutoring and have focused on older students. We present findings from the first randomized controlled trial of virtual tutoring for young children. Students in grades K–2 were assigned to 1:1 tutoring, 2:1 tutoring, or a control group. Virtual tutoring increased early literacy skills by 0.05-SD for all students and 0.08-SD for a sample excluding English learners and students with disabilities (i.e., students not eligible for additional support services). One-on-one tutoring tended to produce larger gains, especially for students initially scoring well below benchmark (0.15-SD). Effects are smaller than typically seen from in-person early literacy tutoring programs but still positive and statistically significant.
The Effects of Virtual Tutoring on Young Readers: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial
Media Mentions
Ever since the pandemic shut down schools in the spring of 2020, education researchers have pointed to tutoring as the most promising way to help kids catch up academically. Evidence from almost 100 studies was overwhelming for a particular kind of tutoring, called high-dosage tutoring, where students focus on either reading or math three to five times a week.
But until recently, there has been little good evidence for the effectiveness of online tutoring, where students and tutors interact via video, text chat and whiteboards. The virtual version has boomed since the federal government handed schools nearly $190 billion of pandemic recovery aid and specifically encouraged them to spend it on tutoring. Now, some new U.S. studies could offer useful guidance to educators.
...
Another study of more than 2,000 elementary school children in Texas tested the difference between one-to-one and two-to-one online tutoring during the 2022-23 school year. These were young, low-income children, in kindergarten through 2nd grade, who were just learning to read. Children who were randomly assigned to get one-to-one tutoring four times a week posted small gains on one test, but not on another, compared to students in a comparison group who didn’t get tutoring. First graders assigned to one-to-one tutoring gained the equivalent of 30 additional days of school. By contrast, children who had been tutored in pairs were statistically no different in reading than the comparison group of untutored children. A draft paper about this study, led by researchers from Stanford University, was posted to the Annenberg website in May 2024.
...
As excitement grows around tutoring as a strategy to combat learning loss, advocates have rightly been encouraged by the growing body of evidence demonstrating the efficacy of tutoring interventions. To date, however, little research has examined the impact of fully virtual tutoring on very young students. Hardly a technicality, this distinction matters because younger children are less likely to have the technical and self-regulation skills upon which virtual learning depends. Now, a new study by researchers from Stanford, Vanderbilt, and UnboundED analyzes the benefits of virtual tutoring specifically for early elementary students.
The authors conducted a randomized controlled trial with 2,085 K–2 students at twelve Texas schools within the same charter network. Those in the sample were randomly assigned to participate either in 1:1 tutoring, 2:1 tutoring, or a control group; the tutoring provider, OnYourMark Education (OYM), is a partner of the unnamed charter network and a science-of-reading-based virtual tutoring program. Students in the 1:1 and 2:1 groups participated in in-school, virtual tutoring for twenty-minute periods, four days a week, from September 2022 until May 2023. For their main measure, the researchers compared students’ beginning-of-the-year performance on a widely used exam, Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills (DIBELS), to their end-of-the-year performance on the same assessment. The analysis controlled for demographic factors like gender, race and ethnicity, and economic disadvantage, and the authors also broke down their findings to understand OYM’s effects on students with differing baseline performance and in different grade levels.
Overall, the results show that OYM produced statistically significant reading gains for participants. On average, the students who received the OYM treatment improved their scores by 0.05–0.08 standard deviations. Gains were slightly larger for those in the 1:1 group, a finding in line with other research on 1:1 tutoring.
...