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11/16/2023. Article
In a significant study involving 1,000 K-2 students in Texas, OnYourMark Education, in partnership with The National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) and Uplift Education, presents compelling evidence of the positive impact of virtual high-impact reading tutoring on early literacy. During the 2022-2023 school year, students engaged in one-on-one virtual reading tutoring sessions, resulting in substantial academic gains.
11/02/2023. Article
Schools across America continue struggling to help their students catch up following unprecedented learning losses resulting from pandemic school closures beginning in March 2020. It is vital—both to address current needs and to stash away for future use—to determine which methods work to boost student achievement. To that end, a group of researchers, led by Stanford University’s Susanna Loeb, recently examined a high-dosage tutoring effort called OnYourMark, a fully virtual model designed to solidify foundational literacy skills for students in kindergarten through second grade.
10/31/2023. Article
Intensive, high-dose tutoring can boost early reading skills, even in a virtual format, according to a new experimental study.
Researchers from the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University tracked the reading progress of about 2,000 K-2 students in a dozen Texas charter schools. Half of the students were randomly assigned to attend class normally, while half received intensive remote tutoring for part of the school day, in small groups, through the nonprofit group OnYourMark, which serves K-2 students in seven states.
10/27/2023. General
As schools, districts, and states work to address the student needs following the pandemic, many turned to high-impact tutoring, a research-based approach to providing individualized instruction to students. In fact, thirty-seven percent of public schools reported providing “high-dosage” tutoring on a federal school pulse panel survey in December 2022. In addition, many states have implemented or are exploring policies to increase access to high-impact tutoring. This brief explores the tutoring policy landscape at the state level as of November 2023.
10/23/2023. Article
“So, high impact tutoring is tutoring that happens with a qualified tutor and that means someone who is trained and is receiving coaching. It also happens frequently. So at least three to 5 times a week, in a small group or one-on-one. It is very personalized,” says Director of Partnerships and Policy for the National Student Support Accelerator Nancy Waymack.
10/23/2023. Article
In a hopeful sign for early literacy gains, K-2 students who received individual virtual tutoring during the 2022-23 school year showed higher reading test scores than their peers by the end of the year, according to a study released Wednesday by a tutoring research program at Stanford University.
The study, which analyzed 2,085 students across 12 Texas charter schools, found students using 1:1 or 2:1 virtual tutoring services performed 1.57 percentile points higher.
While the study found positive signs that the online tutoring model boosted reading comprehension for younger students, researchers acknowledged the outcomes from virtual tutoring are “more modest” than from similar in-person tutoring programs.
10/18/2023. Article
While the virtual program was still less effective than in-person tutoring, the model could be a breakthrough for schools in rural areas and those that have struggled to recruit tutors, Loeb said. Districts’ pandemic recovery efforts have sometimes fallen short because they can’t find trained educators or volunteers to do the job. And research by Loeb and others has found that only a fraction of students who need extra help take advantage of on-demand virtual tutoring programs.
10/16/2023. General
This study is the first randomized controlled trial of a virtual early literacy tutoring program. OnYourMark Education provides tutoring grounded in the science of reading and focused on foundational literacy skills (e.g., phonics, phonological awareness, reading fluency). During the 2022-23 school year, OnYourMark partnered with 12 schools in a large charter-management organization in the southern United States to provide virtual tutoring in school to kindergarten, first, and second grade students. The program included four sessions per week for 20 minutes per session from September through May. We randomly assigned students to one-on-one tutoring (N=510), two-on-one tutoring (N=570), or a business-as-usual control group (N=1,005). We find that students assigned to OnYourMark tutoring scored approximately 0.08 SD higher on end-of-year early literacy tests than students in the business-as-usual control group, with lower-performing students (0.18 SD) and first graders (0.19 SD) assigned to 1:1 tutoring benefiting most. These positive findings from a virtual program with young readers provides initial evidence that virtual tutoring could be a promising option, especially in contexts with barriers to implementing in-person early literacy tutoring.
09/27/2023. Article
Districts across the nation use Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) to target appropriate supports for each student. High-impact tutoring is the most effective research-backed academic support – consistently demonstrating from six months to over two years of learning gains for students across grade levels and content areas in a single year of tutoring.
Districts that have chosen to integrate high-impact tutoring with MTSS are finding that embedding this highly effective support into the fabric of their schools improves student outcomes, reduces implementation challenges, improves instructional coherence, and streamlines operations.
09/22/2023. General
Districts across the nation use Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) to target appropriate supports for each student. High-impact tutoring is the most effective research-backed academic support – consistently demonstrating from six months to over two years of learning gains for students across grade levels and content areas in a single year of tutoring.
Districts that have chosen to integrate high-impact tutoring with MTSS are finding that embedding this highly effective support into the fabric of their schools improves student outcomes, reduces implementation challenges, improves instructional coherence, and streamlines operations.
07/28/2023. Research Study
Tutoring has emerged as an especially promising strategy for supporting students academically. This study synthesizes 33 articles on the implementation of tutoring, defined as one-to-one or small-group instruction in which a human tutor supports students grades K-12 in an academic subject, to better understand the facilitators and barriers to program success. We find that policies influenced tutoring implementation through the allocation of federal funding and stipulation of program design. Tutoring program launch has often been facilitated by strategic relationships between schools and external tutoring providers and strengthened by transparent assessments of program quality and effectiveness. Successful implementation hinged on the support of school leaders with the power to direct school funding, space, and time. Tutoring setting and schedule, recruitment and training, and curriculum influenced whether students are able to access quality tutoring and instruction. Ultimately, evidence suggests that tutoring was most meaningful when tutors fostered positive student-tutor relationships which they drew upon to target instruction toward students’ strengths and needs.
07/12/2023. General
Many districts sought to provide students with high-impact tutoring in response to pandemic-induced learning needs. Some started earlier than others, and we aimed to learn from the experiences of the early adopters to help inform a smoother implementation among those beginning the process later. During the 2021-22 school year, we partnered with school districts, tutoring providers, and quarterback organizations that support implementation across districts to learn from their efforts in implementing tutoring.
05/31/2023. Article
Developing and staffing the kind of tutoring that research has shown is most effective—often referred to as high quality, or high-impact tutoring—is complex, time-consuming, and expensive. Tutors meet with students at least three times a week, in small groups or one-on-one. Work should be targeted to a specific subject and aligned to high-quality curriculum, and should develop strong tutor-tutee relationships.
“High-impact tutoring is not homework help. They’re not sporadically dropping in,” said Carly Robinson, a senior researcher at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education who works with the National Student Support Accelerator, a group promoting research-based tutoring programs.
05/18/2023. Article
“The truth is that there are a lot of scabbed knees and bruises in this work,” Borders, who oversees the state’s tutoring effort, said at a conference held last week at Stanford University about the future of tutoring. “Not going to sugar coat this, guys. It’s hard work.”
Early in the pandemic, experts identified high-dosage tutoring — the kind that’s offered multiple times per week, in small groups, with a consistent tutor — as a potentially successful strategy for helping students plug learning gaps. But more than two years into a national push to expand the reach of tutoring, many schools are still struggling with basics, like how to staff and schedule their programs.
04/27/2023. Article
Of all academic interventions, so-called “high-dosage” tutoring has shown the most evidence of helping students gain academic ground quickly.
Susanna Loeb, the founder and executive director of the National Student Support Accelerator, studies how schools can use and scale up intensive tutoring, which involves one-on-one situations or very small groups meeting at least 30 minutes, three or more times a week.
Loeb, who is also a professor and the director of the education policy initiative at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, spoke with Education Week about what goes into effective tutoring.
04/25/2023. Article
High-quality tutoring is one of the most effective educational interventions we have – but we need both humans and technology for it to work. In a standing-room-only session, GSE Professor Susanna Loeb, a faculty lead at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, spoke alongside school district superintendents on the value of high-impact tutoring. The most important factors in effective tutoring, she said, are (1) the tutor has data on specific areas where the student needs support, (2) the tutor has high-quality materials and training, and (3) there is a positive, trusting relationship between the tutor and student. New technologies, including AI, can make the first and second elements much easier – but they will never be able to replace human adults in the relational piece, which is crucial to student engagement and motivation.
04/24/2023. Article
Providing students with tutoring in addition to in-class learning time is an oft-prescribed remedy for both catching up students who are behind and accelerating students who are capable of even higher performance. Two common sticking points to providing that remedy are finding additional time in the day, week, or year for the intervention and finding enough qualified personnel. A new study from the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) evaluates a promising program that could reduce both of these sticking points to manageable levels.
04/17/2023. Article
A short-burst, in-person 1:1 tutoring model has shown significant gains in early literacy for kindergarten students, according to research presented Thursday by Carly Robinson, a senior researcher at Stanford University and a member of the National Student Support Accelerator, at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting in Chicago.
04/13/2023. Article
Pearl, the leading research-based tutor management platform, announced today insights from its inaugural Community
03/29/2023. Article
“Portland is probably doing the right thing by starting small and getting it right,” Loeb said. “Using your own teachers can be effective and easier to implement since the teachers are well versed in what the students should be learning and they likely already know the students.”
Critically, though, structuring the program this way could limit the district’s ability to scale it up, Loeb added. That’s a particular concern given the millions of dollars in federal pandemic relief money that has to be spent or returned by September 2024.
03/27/2023. Article
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.
03/20/2023. Article
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.
03/15/2023. Article
“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.”
03/08/2023. Article
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.
03/06/2023. Article
“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.