Research Guidance

Over the past couple of years, scaling well-researched solutions has been shown to also counter the negative effects of the pandemic, Loeb said, from widening achievement gaps and missed school time, to poorer social and emotional development. Her team recently launched the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) to address educational inequities resulting from the pandemic. NSSA conducts research on the most promising tutoring practices and works with district leaders and others to provide research-backed guidance on implementing high-impact tutoring. 

“Our students deserve this work,” Loeb said. “From our research, we learn so much about how to engage students and accelerate their learning. The practical, easy-to-use learnings from research need to reach decision makers so that our students can benefit.”

Tips by Text and NSSA are part of SCALE, Loeb’s new initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, a university-wide effort addressing some of the most challenging issues in education through research, partnerships, and technological innovation. 

In the past five years, the Texas district’s investments in staffing and high dosage tutoring are paying off.

That’s why the district piloted a virtual tutoring program in the 2020-21 school year. Middle school students were the first to participate. In spring 2021, the live virtual tutoring program expanded to serve 6,000 students in K-12, he said.

That same spring, Ector County ISD designated $10 million of its $93 million in federal pandemic relief funds to tutoring over the next three years, according to a report by university-based research nonprofits FutureEd and the National Student Support Accelerator.

Generative AI, including Language Models (LMs), holds the promise to reshape key sectors like education, healthcare, and law, which rely heavily on skilled professionals to navigate complex responsibilities. In education, for instance, effective teacher training with expert feedback is crucial yet costly, limiting opportunities to enhance educational quality on a larger scale.

High-impact tutoring has the strongest evidence base of any approach for improving student learning, and contributes to increased engagement and attendance. As far as proven education solutions go, it’s a pretty darn good one, and has rightfully been a bipartisan priority since the pandemic. 

But federal pandemic relief money that helped fuel the expansion of such programs dried up in September, and recent research has sparked debates about the high-impact tutoring’s effectiveness when implemented at scale. This includes an evaluation of Metro Nashville Public Schools’ tutoring program that reported small gains for students and a meta-analysis of large high-impact tutoring programs that showed challenges in maintaining evidence-based practices. 

Research reveals the most effective ways to help young struggling readers through tutoring.

Tutoring has gained popularity as a strategy to improve the academic achievement of struggling students. Intensive, relationship-based tutoring is a highly effective academic support for many students, particularly in the early elementary years when school schedules and classroom routines are flexible (Groom-Thomas et al., 2023). For schools considering how to begin tutoring or where to prioritize resources, early literacy tutoring — which is both effective and feasible — is a good place to start.

A new Stanford University report examines the first year of D.C.'s multimillion-dollar effort to get students back on track.

D.C. students who got frequent, small group tutoring improved their reading and math scores after the return to inperson classes, attended more classes and had a stronger sense of belonging at school, according to new research into the city's multimillion-dollar tutoring program.

The findings from Stanford University are encouraging, researchers said: Although students have yet to fully recover from the pandemic-induced slump that saw test scores plummet and absenteeism rise, children in D.C. are making progress.

Tutoring is a win-win job for college and K-12 students, but the question remains how best to connect college students who need these jobs with the paid tutoring positions available. In a recent working paper with colleagues, we report on a randomized controlled trial that tested whether highlighting the different benefits of a tutoring job can drive changes in tutor applications and employment. We partnered with Grand Valley State University (GVSU) to recruit paid tutors for a campus initiative started in 2020 to support Michigan K-12 students. Tutoring at GVSU was not only a paid position—it was a highly paid position on campus. Tutors could earn up to $17.70 per hour, the highest rate in the GVSU student hourly wage range and well above the state minimum wage at the time of the study ($10.10).