Planning

In a recent study, we report on the implementation of opt-in, on-demand tutoring in partnership with the Aspire Public Schools (a charter management organization, or CMO) in California. The CMO provided 7,000 middle and high school students with free, unlimited access to one-on-one chat-based tutoring during the spring 2021 semester. Students accessed the program from a mobile device and could request help from an available tutor in any core subject. The topic of each tutoring session was usually driven by student questions and the interaction between tutors and students were chat-based with help from a virtual whiteboard to facilitate joint work.

Jack Goodwin was already struggling with math in middle school when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, upending his education even more. His mom, Shelly, knew he needed extra help to catch up.

But Shelly Goodwin couldn’t find a tutor in their small town of Paris, about four hours south of Chicago.

“I would ask the teachers, ‘Do you know anybody that tutors or can you tutor?’,” Shelly Goodwin said. “They would try to meet with [Jack] after school but they had five or six kids after school and they would say, ‘We don’t really know anyone that tutors around here.’”

With reading and math scores plummeting during the pandemic, educators and parents are now turning their attention to how kids can catch up. In the following Q&A, Susanna Loeb, an education economist at Brown University, shines a light on the best ways to use tutoring to help students get back on track.

The Education Week Spotlight on Tutoring is a collection of articles hand-picked by our editors for their insights on the advantages of tutoring as an academic recovery tool, how districts can expand access to tutoring, long-term investments in tutoring, initiatives that provide support to tutoring programs, tutoring strategies that combat learning loss, and more.

Pearl's data, research and analysis partners include the Annenberg Institute at Brown University  with a mission to equalize and improve educational opportunities through actionable knowledge, human development and broad engagement and its National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA). Both organizations consulted with ISU and ITI in the planning and development, and establishing success metrics for the statewide tutoring program.

Research shows that high-impact tutoring can produce learning gains for a variety of students, but which tutoring designs are most effective from a cost and academic perspective? Three school districts across the country will begin data-driven experiments to answer that question and more as part of a research project led by Littera Education. The project, which is funded by a Gates Foundation grant, will use the Littera Tutoring Management System (TMS) in conjunction with assessment and curriculum from Renaissance.

Evidence suggests that, over time, tutoring in small groups is beneficial, regardless of whether children are in a rural, suburban, or urban environment. In fact, research published in 2021 by Brown University's Annenberg Institute for School Reform showed that consistent tutoring sessions can accelerate learning by two to 10 months.

Teach For America, the organization I lead, launched a tutoring initiative in fall 2020 following research that shows that high-dose, high-quality tutoring is one of the most effective ways to combat learning loss. One study that looked at the impact of having a well-trained tutor meet three times a week with a group of up to four students found it came close to providing the equivalent of nearly five months of learning. A 2021 meta-analysis from researchers at Brown University concluded tutoring has a more significant effect on student achievement than smaller class sizes, vacation or summer classes and longer school days or years.