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With “proper supports, such as good materials and coaching, they can be excellent tutors,” said Stanford professor Susanna Loeb, who founded the National Student Support Accelerator to expand access to high-quality tutoring.


Are you a college or university leader looking to improve opportunities for your students?

Or maybe you are a district leader looking to partner with a college or university to provide tutoring for your students?

The National Student Support Accelerator’s High Impact Tutoring: Higher Education Institution Playbook supports higher education institutions in partnering with school districts to offer high-impact tutoring services.


“These results are big,” said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford professor of education who was a member of the research team and heads the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford research organization that studies tutoring and released this study in February 2023. “What’s so exciting about this study is it shows that you can get a lot of the benefits of high impact tutoring – relationship-based, individualized instruction with really strong instructional materials – at a cost that is doable for most districts in the long run.”

“Tutoring is one of the most promising approaches for accelerating student learning and reducing educational disparities,” according to a working paper of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.

However, there is still little data on which programs are most effective, studies show.

Even when tutoring is available, struggling students are far less likely to opt in than their more-engaged and higher-achieving peers, the Annenberg paper also found.


Having partnered with multiple state, university and district-led community-tutoring programs, Pearl is developing the nation’s most diverse dataset in the tutoring industry. The platform is foundational for managing and scaling hybrid tutoring through evidence-based best practices and collaborates with the Annenberg Institute at Brown University and its National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) to safely gather data to continuously improve program design and measurably accelerate student outcomes.


"I do think that as districts have success in tutoring, and see student learning ... then they’ll start to think more about how they embed it, and link it more deeply to the rest of the work they’re doing in schools." Susanna Loeb, founder and executive director, National Student Support Accelerator

At the conclusion of the first year of a four-year longitudinal study, researchers at Stanford University’s Annenberg Institute National Student Support Accelerator found that 68% of students who participated in 1:1 high impact tutoring from Chapter One met or exceeded end-of-year early literacy benchmarks, compared to 32% of students in the control group. Chapter One high impact tutoring is an ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act) Tier 1 evidence-based intervention.


The latest installment also provided a detailed look at schools’ efforts to implement high-dosage tutoring, which Stanford University researcher Susanna Loeb called the “best approach that we know for accelerating students’ learning” because it offers students help from “an adult who knows them, cares about them and has the tools to address their needs.” 

She has been tracking the implementation of large-scale tutoring efforts across the country as part of the National Student Support Accelerator and called the survey results “the most comprehensive information out there” on how schools are addressing learning loss.