• ‘A place where ideas about learning will take root and reach the world’

    | Stanford Report

    Stanford has officially dedicated the new buildings of the Graduate School of Education, completing its journey to create a state-of-the-art hub for education research, teaching, and collaboration at the heart of campus.

  • Lessons from a Failed Texas Tutoring Program

    | The 74

    Experts view the findings as a cautionary tale of how tutoring can go wrong.

    The district had to wait on background checks for tutors, many students were still chronically absent and the tutoring sessions often conflicted with other lessons or special events. As a result, students didn’t receive the 30 hours or more required under a state law mandating tutoring for those who failed the annual state test. Instead of five days a week as planned, 81% of the students attended tutoring three or fewer days, and most students worked with a different tutor every time they attended a session.

    The findings reinforce the importance of protecting the time students are supposed to receive tutoring, said Elizabeth Huffaker, an assistant professor of education at the University of Florida and the lead author of the study.

    High-dosage models — featuring individualized sessions held at least three times a week with the same, well-trained tutor — can still “drive really significant learning gains,” she said, “but in the field, things are always a little bit more complicated.”

  • The non-instructional ways schools are using AI

    | District Administration

    Meanwhile, independent research from Stanford University’s SCALE Initiative underscores how quickly teachers learn to appreciate AI’s potential for improving their workflow.

    The researchers analyzed more than 9,000 teachers who were brand new to the platform SchoolAI over 90 days. What they found was that more than 40% of teachers became “regular” or “power users,” meaning they used the tool for up to 49 days.

    Teachers also relied heavily on chatbot assistants, which accounted for more than 50% of their activity.

    Chris Agnew, director of the Generative AI for Education Hub at Stanford, says AI is challenging many decades-old methods of instruction. However, that’s not a bad thing.

    “We’ve been talking about more authentic assessment means for 25 years and the need to evolve schools to build more focus on durable skills,” Agnew says. “We have not done a great job of doing that, so the silver lining is that AI might force that.”

  • Overdeck Family Foundation Awards $10.6 Million in Grants in Q3 2025

    | Overdeck Family Foundation

    In Q3 2025, our foundation awarded grants totaling over $10 million.

    Our third quarter grantmaking focuses on identifying and fueling the scale of cost-effective programs and solutions that accelerate improvement in key academic and socioemotional outcomes for all children. As always, we place an emphasis on grantmaking and strategic support that unlock innovation, evidence, and growth for our grantees.

    Below, we highlighted just some of the direct impact and ecosystem organizations we’re proud to support this quarter.

    • $1,150,000 over two years to Stanford University’s SCALE Initiative to support research and dissemination efforts related to high-impact tutoring and the use of generative AI in education. The National Student Support Accelerator will use the funding to generate practice-relevant research on high-impact tutoring; develop tools and standards to support implementation at scale; and engage and equip education leaders to make evidence-informed decisions. The Generative AI for Education Hub will conduct foundational research, build practical tools, and drive field-wide engagement, including enhancing its AI Research Repository.

     

  • Virtual tutoring is here to stay. New research points to ways to make it better.

    | Chalkbeat

    Two studies from Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator released Wednesday used natural language processing technologies to review transcripts from tens of thousands of hours of virtual tutoring sessions. Their goal: to better understand exactly what happens between tutors and students in these sessions.

    One study examines the impact of disruptions as revealed through tutor comments, such as “You can’t see me? I’m not sure why you can’t see me” or “Sorry. Did you say something? It was hard to hear.”

    Researchers found that 19% of available time was lost to disruptions, whether from technological issues, distracted students, or background noise. Time lost to disruptions was even greater when tutors were working with more than one student, especially if one of the students entered the session late.

  • The Post-Pandemic Promise of High-Impact Tutoring

    | The 74

    As U.S. public schools emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, longtime education policy wonk Liz Cohen saw that in many places, educators were finally taking tutoring seriously. 

    For a year and a half in 2023 and 2024, Cohen traversed the country, interviewing educators, researchers and policymakers and observing tutoring sessions in seven states and the District of Columbia. 

    Now the vice president of policy for the education group 50CAN, Cohen shares her findings in a new book, out today from Harvard Education Press: The Future of Tutoring: Lessons from 10,000 School District Tutoring Initiatives.

  • Congratulations to Carly Robinson, Recipient of SREE 2025 Early Career Award

    | Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE)

    Congratulations to Carly Robinson, Recipient of SREE 2025 Early Career Award
  • Why tutoring is a logistics problem worth solving

    | District Administration

    As education researchers, we hear directly from district leaders about the realities they and their teams face every day. Leading a school district means weighing competing priorities and managing resources, while finding space for new ideas that promise to strengthen teaching and learning.

    Each of these efforts has value and reflects a commitment to improvement. Yet amid the churn of initiatives, it’s worth remembering the strategies that have been proven to work time and again.

    Tutoring is one of those strategies. Far from a passing trend that fades after a year, high-impact tutoring is a unicorn in the oft-changing tides of education reform: it is both a centuries-old, pedagogically sound and educator-approved way to teach children, and it’s an approach proven by hundreds of rigorous studies over decades.

  • Parents, LAUSD settle suit; 100,000 students get 45 tutoring hours for three years

    | EdSource

    While various stakeholders are celebrating the settlement’s outcome, there is still work to be done to ensure students receive adequate academic support. 

    When done properly, high-impact tutoring is one of the most researched and effective learning interventions, according to Kathy Bendheim, the strategic advising director for the Stanford Graduate School of Education’s National Student Support Accelerator. And there is research indicating that it can help boost attendance. 

    “It will go a really long way to helping those students who fell behind during Covid,” Bendheim said. “But even before Covid, not all students were on grade level, far from it. And so, we believe that this type of tutoring should be incorporated into schools for the long run … for the students who need it.”

  • Stanford Study: Teachers Lean on AI for Productivity

    | government technology

    An analysis of 9,000 U.S. educators using SchoolAI shows that the more they use the platform, the more they gravitate toward teacher-facing features that support tasks like lesson planning and grading.

    Teachers who use artificial intelligence tools regularly tend to focus more on teacher-facing productivity features and less on student-facing chatbots, Stanford University researchers found.

    As AI use in education grows more popular, there is a strong desire among some education leaders and researchers to understand what that usage looks like. A recent Gallup poll, for example, found that 6 in 10 teachers reported using AI for their work. Rather than relying on self-reported data to answer this question, the Stanford study is based on usage logs from the AI platform SchoolAI.

    “We all know that humans are flawed at reporting our own behavior accurately,” Chris Agnew, director of Stanford’s Generative AI for Education Hub, who worked on the project, said.