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Tutors Don’t Get Much Training. A New Effort Could Help
Sustained tutoring designed to help kids catch up is intensive, structured, and highly relational, typically consisting of students working in 30-minute sessions three or more times a week with a trained educator.
Now, a new initiative is training tutors for the rigor and intensity needed to make it effective.
This kind of tutoring, considered the most intensive model, spread rapidly during pandemic-recovery efforts. Half of all high-poverty schools and 46 percent of public schools offer high-impact or high dosage tutoring as of May, up from 39 percent of all public schools and 47 percent of high-poverty schools in October 2023, according to the federal Schools Pulse Panel survey data, an ongoing collection from the U.S. Department of Education’s statistics wing.
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“It’s much more than just the dosage that makes the difference in this type of tutoring,” said Kathy Bendheim, the director of strategic advising for the National Student Support Accelerator, which studies tutoring models. “You do it with a consistent tutor, and it’s not homework help—it’s intentional instruction based on data about where that student is on their academic journey and what their specific instructional needs are.”
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Stanford conference explores education technology in the age of AI
“We want students to thrive throughout their whole life, and we want them to have the educational experiences that lead to that thriving,” said Professor Susanna Loeb in the opening panel of the 2024 Accelerate Edtech Impact summit at Stanford. “We want that for all students. We don’t just want that for students from well resourced families, and we don’t just want that for students who are motivated and engaged in school right now … we really have to think about the broad range of students.”
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Staying Bold: Redefining the Role of Education Research in a Rapidly Evolving World
| Stanford Accelerator for Learning
How can education research push boundaries, remain relevant, and lead transformative change in an era of rapid technological and societal shifts? Moderator Lewis Leiboh (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) led the conversation with Auditi Chakravarty (AERDF), Libby Hills (Jacobs Foundation), Kyla Johnson-Trammell (Oakland Unified School District), and Susanna Loeb (Stanford Accelerator for Learning).
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Indiana bet big on tutoring for academic recovery. Will lawmakers save the programs when federal funds expire?
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.
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This teacher has a super power to help her young students learn to read
Pandemic-era virtual learning failed. So why are these teachers hyped to get their students back online?
Therein lies the challenge of modern teaching, especially in a post-pandemic world, where foundational deficits, if not addressed early and aggressively, can hamstring students for life. So what’s McGee to do?
As a teacher in the Chelsea Public Schools, she has been able to deploy a superpower of sorts, relying on an army of trained reading tutors to provide tailored, one-on-one instruction to more than half of her students for 15 minutes every school day. The tutors, employed by Ignite Reading, a San Francisco-based company, beam in through interactive video calls on students’ laptops.
Chelsea’s experiment, which the district began during the 2023-24 school year, is an example of “high-dosage” tutoring, a research-backed practice requiring small groupings and highly trained tutors, and which experts nationally say is key to pandemic recovery.
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This Is a Critical Moment for High-Impact Tutoring. Don’t Give up on It
| The 74
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.
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What Happens When an AI Assistant Helps the Tutor, Instead of the Student
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.
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Biden-Harris Administration Exceeds Goal of Recruiting 250,000 New Tutors, Mentors, and Student Success and Postsecondary Transition Coaches Across the Country
| U.S. Department of Education
At a White House event today, Domestic Policy Advisor Neera Tanden, in coordination with the U.S. Department of Education (Department), AmeriCorps, and the Everyone Graduates Center at the Johns Hopkins University, will announce that the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS) has exceeded President Biden’s call to recruit an additional 250,000 adults into high-impact student roles by summer 2025 to support academic success for all students. These roles range from tutors, mentors, student success coaches, postsecondary transition coaches, and wraparound/integrated student support coordinators. As of the end of the 2023-2024 school year, an additional 320,000 adults have stepped into these roles in schools, exceeding the President’s goal and doing so a year early.
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How AI can improve tutor effectiveness
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.
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