• Virtual tutoring studies offer hope for early literacy outcomes

    | K-12 DIVE

    High-dosage virtual 1:1 tutoring programs analyzed in two university-led studies found significant gains for young students’ reading skills.

    Dive Brief:

    • Struggling readers in Missouri’s Kansas City Public Schools showed statistically significant gains in literacy outcomes when virtual high-impact tutoring was used within a multi-tiered system of support framework, a study from Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator found.
    • Using 1:1 teacher-led virtual tutoring program in early literacy, the study analyzed data from 1,550 students across 14 elementary schools in grades 1-4. Students who scored “well below” grade level on benchmark assessments at the start of the 2024-25 school year particularly benefited.
    • Participating students also saw significantly higher gains in annual typical growth (10.84 percentage points) and annual stretch growth (5.24 percentage points) on the i-Ready reading assessment.
  • The Case for Reading Tutoring Before 3rd Grade, Not After

    | Education Week

    Tutoring has been the focus of learning-recovery initiatives following the pandemic, but many districts have struggled to sustain the labor-intensive and expensive intervention after federal recovery grants ended, and others have seen minimal effects from the programs, largely due to implementation challenges. That reality has pushed districts to reconsider not just whether tutoring works, but when it works best.

    Emerging evidence on Ignite Reading and similar programs suggests virtual tutoring can be as effective as in-person tutoring at filling basic literacy skills gaps, though not always less costly. The nonprofit National Student Support Accelerator, which studies tutoring models, estimates high-intensity in-person tutoring programs typically cost $1,000 to $3,000 per student, with some programs topping $4,000 per student. Ignite Reading averages $2,500 per student, including technology and staff support.

  • Lessons That Are Shaping Our 2026 Learning Agenda

    | Overdeck Family Foundation

    Artificial Intelligence: To what degree can AI cost-effectively advance student or teacher outcomes?

    While AI has the potential to improve student outcomes, the rapid proliferation of AI tools in education has outpaced the evidence base. The most recent EdTech Insiders Generative AI Map, funded by Overdeck Family Foundation, identifies more than 300 AI tools and use cases for the edtech community—signaling sizable growth from even a few months earlier. Encouragingly, EdTech Insiders has launched a partnership with Stanford SCALE to apply a shared taxonomy that documents emerging evidence, which now features more than 1,000 studies. To date, evidence most consistently supports administrative and planning use cases for AI in education, with far less conclusive findings for elementary and middle school student-facing outcomes. These findings suggest the need for funders to build the evidence base and support disciplined experimentation, which we’re excited to do in 2026.

  • New Research Strengthens Case for Virtual Tutoring

    | The 74

    In Massachusetts, first graders who spent 15 minutes a day online with a tutor from Ignite Reading stayed on track a year later without additional tutoring, according to data shared exclusively with The 74. Students gained, on average, at least five additional months of learning over their expected growth. 

    Another virtual program, Hoot Reading, produced positive results in the Kansas City, Missouri, schools. Students who received one-on-one tutoring from certified teachers made greater progress than those who didn’t receive the extra help, new data shows. 

    “Virtual models are getting stronger,” said Amanda Neitzel, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of the Ignite Reading study. “If you go back just a few years, we had no examples of evidence-proven models and now we are getting them.”

  • COVID Relief Funds are Gone, But More States Commit to High-Impact Tutoring

    | The 74

    In late 2024, Susanna Loeb, one of the nation’s leading researchers on tutoring, had doubts about the future of a field she’s worked hard to advance. 

    Over $120 billion in federal COVID relief funds were expiring, leaving school leaders and tutoring providers uncertain whether programs would continue. The incoming administration was focused on slashing Department of Education spending, not issuing new grants. 

    “We didn’t know if this administration would put anything into education,” said Loeb, a Stanford University professor who studies tutoring programs. “We were worried that all of the experimentation that had been going on and that access to tutoring would drop precipitously.” 

  • AI+Education Summit 2026: From Possibility to Progress

    | Stanford HAI

  • AI Challenges Core Assumptions in Education

    | The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI)

    Last week, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and the Stanford Accelerator for Learning convened educators, researchers, technologists, policy experts, and more for the fourth annual AI+Education Summit. The day featured keynotes and panel discussions on the challenges and opportunities facing schools, teachers, and students as AI transforms the learning experience.

    At the summit, several themes emerged: AI has created an assessment crisis – student projects no longer indicate a strong learning process; schools are awash with too many AI products and need better evaluations and sustainable adoption models; AI’s benefits aren’t equitable; AI literacy is a non-negotiable; human connection is irreplaceable.

    Read a few of the highlights from the Feb. 11, 2026 event, and watch the full conference on YouTube.

  • Research Notes: Two Emerging Strategies for Using AI in Tutoring

    | FutureEd

    A second study conducted by researchers at Stanford University examined a different model: Tutor CoPilot, an AI-tool designed to provide guidance to tutors during chat-based tutoring sessions. Different from LearnLM, which gives the supervising tutor only one suggested response, Tutor CoPilot gives tutors three suggested responses that tutors can choose from, edit, or regenerate. In a study conducted between March and May 2024, 1,000 elementary school students were randomly assigned to chat-based sessions with either a human tutor alone or a human tutor using Tutor CoPilot.

    Students in the Tutor CoPilot condition were four percentage points more likely to achieve topic mastery than students assigned to human tutors, with the largest gains (up to 9 points) among students assigned to lower-rated and less-experienced tutors. The researchers suggest that these improvements were likely driven by the use of higher-quality instructional practices—tutors using CoPilot were 10 percentage points more likely to prompt students to explain their thinking, while tutors in the control condition were more likely to rely on generic encouragement.

  • How Districts Can Fund High-Quality Tutoring Now That ESSER Money Is Gone

    | The 74

    High-quality tutoring has emerged as an important post-pandemic strategy for helping struggling students in public schools. Research finds that tutoring often results in substantial additional learning gains when delivered during the school day, in small groups with the same tutors and multiple times a week for at least 10 weeks. 

    But this often comes with a substantial price tag — depending on the model and staffing approach, costs can range from $1,200 to $2,500 per student per year. During the pandemic, many districts relied on federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds to launch or expand tutoring programs, but these have largely expired.

  • Statewide Briefing on Getting Down to Facts III

    | Getting Down to Facts III

    The Stanford SCALE Initiative and Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) invite you to join us for a virtual statewide education partner briefing on the next phase of the Getting Down to Facts III project. Your leadership and perspective are essential as we work to connect rigorous research with the realities facing California’s students, families, and schools. This virtual session brings together community partners, policymakers, researchers, and education leaders to share plans, understand overlap, and collaborate on the statewide work ahead for California schools.