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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.”
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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.”
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AI+Education Summit 2026: From Possibility to Progress
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
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.
Why One-on-One Tutoring Works
A recently published study from Stanford SCALE Initiative examines why one-on-one early literacy tutoring produces substantially larger learning gains than two-on-one tutoring, drawing on detailed transcript data from a large randomized controlled trial of virtual tutoring for K–2 students. Prior work from the same intervention found that one-on-one tutoring nearly doubled impacts on literacy outcomes compared to tutoring two students at a time. This study focuses on uncovering the mechanisms behind that difference.
Catapult Learning White Paper Demonstrates High-Impact Tutoring’s Effectiveness in Generating Measurable Academic Gains for K-12 Students
High-impact tutoring is now widely recognized as one of the most effective strategies for addressing learning gaps. Research from the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA), the Annenberg Institute’s EdResearch for Recovery, and other national studies shows that frequent, small-group or one-on-one tutoring delivered by trained tutors using high-quality curricula consistently produces significant academic gains.How Tutor Co-Pilot Systems Scale Teaching Capacity Worldwide
| AI CERTs
Stanford’s National Student Support Accelerator ran the largest randomized trial to date. Researchers embedded tutor co-pilot systems within 900 tutors serving 1,800 students. Overall mastery rose four percentage points over control groups. Moreover, students paired with lower-rated tutors gained nine points. World Bank teams replicated positive effects in Nigerian secondary English classes. The AI assistant there delivered 0.31 standard deviation growth within six weeks. Consequently, analysts equated the short program to almost two years of schooling.
© Stanford University. Stanford, California 94305.