Research Studies

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.

In-school tutoring is most effective, researchers say

When considering which programs to fund, Indiana should consider what research says about high-impact tutoring programs, said Nancy Waymack, director of research partnerships and policy for Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator, which provides resources for districts implementing tutoring programs.

High-impact tutoring is delivered one-on-one or in small groups by consistent and well-trained tutors. It happens during the school day up to five days a week, integrated with classroom instruction.

Indiana Learns requires parents to apply for the grant and then schedule and bring their children to lessons. The grant expanded in 2023 to allow tutoring during certain blocks of the school day, such as lunchtime, but it’s not clear how widespread that option is.

An AI-powered tutoring assistant increased human tutors’ capacity to help students through math problems and improved students’ performance in math, according to a Stanford University study.

The digital tool, Tutor CoPilot, was created by Stanford researchers to guide tutors, especially novices, in their interactions with students.

The study is the first randomized controlled trial to examine a human-AI partnership in live tutoring, according to the researchers. The study examines whether the tool is effective for improving tutors’ skills and students’ math learning.

Students whose tutors used Tutor CoPilot were 4 percentage points more likely to progress through math tutoring session assessments successfully compared to students whose tutors did not have AI assistance, the study found.

The approach particularly benefited lower-rated and less-experienced tutors, researchers said. Students of lower-rated tutors who used the AI assistance increased their math proficiency up to 9 percentage points on average compared to students learning from lower-rated tutors without AI assistance.

The study included 900 tutors and 1,800 elementary and secondary school students from a large school district in the South. Stanford partnered with tutoring company FEV Tutor to pilot the tool’s implementation.

Here’s how it works: A tutor presents a subtraction problem to a student. If the student answers incorrectly, the tutor can activate Tutor CoPilot, which will recommend that the tutor ask the student to identify the numbers in the problem or suggest the student draw the items that need to be subtracted. 

An AI-powered digital tutoring assistant designed by Stanford University researchers shows modest promise at improving students’ short-term performance in math, suggesting that the best use of artificial intelligence in virtual tutoring for now might be in supporting, not supplanting, human instructors.

The open-source tool, which researchers say other educators can recreate and integrate into their tutoring systems, made the human tutors slightly more effective. And the weakest tutors became nearly as effective as their more highly-rated peers, according to a study released Monday. 

You can’t argue with data. Research shows that high-dosage tutoring is one of the most effective ways to help students make academic progress. Yet few students actually receive it. A recent study from Stanford University demonstrated the many positive effects of tutoring, including increased reading and math scores, attendance and a feeling of belonging. Teach For America’s (TFA) tutoring program, the Ignite Fellowship, finds and develops tutors who connect virtually with students during the school day. Fellows, who are paid for their work, are supported by a school-based veteran educator to customize instruction. Seventy-one percent of the 3,500 students across the country being tutored by Ignite fellows meet their semester-long reading and math goals.

Since 2022, public schools in the District of Columbia have been working to mitigate Covid learning disruptions by establishing and ramping up high-impact tutoring (HIT) efforts. Data on the outcome of these efforts are beginning to emerge, and a new report from the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) shows some minimally encouraging signs.

NSSA is an offshoot of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and Systems Change for Advancing Learning and Equity, an initiative focused on researching how tutoring can best benefit students. Its new report looks at the first full year of HIT implementation in D.C. schools during 2022–23. Tutoring efforts that year concentrated on math and English language arts (ELA) for students in all grades and was focused on schools—both district and charter—with the greatest concentrations of students identified as at risk. It’s interesting to note that “at risk” doesn’t generally mean academic risk for schools in the district, but rather centers primarily on student socioeconomic status and homelessness, in the context of this wholly-academic intervention. Pre-existing academic need appears not to have been a driving force in choosing where tutors were placed, although some data suggest that academic performance may have influenced teachers’ decisions on which students to refer for tutoring.

“This is most likely to happen if parents both want this and believe that they can get this – and deserve to get this – at school,” says Susanna Loeb, a professor of education at Stanford University in California. 

Amid the flurry of activity in recent years, researchers and policy advocates are increasingly pointing to a specific kind of tutoring as the most effective. Known as “high-impact” or “high-dosage,” it generally refers to tutoring that happens at least three times a week for 30-minute sessions with groups of four or fewer students. And if it occurs during the regular school day? Even better.