• 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.

  • Why One-on-One Tutoring Works

    | Education Sciences

    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

    | Business Insider

    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.

  • Susanna Loeb is named to the 2026 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings

    | Education Week

    Susanna Loeb is named to the 2026 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, ranking the 200 university-based scholars in the United States who had the biggest impact on educational practice and policy last year.

  • AI and the future of human learning

    | School's In - Stanford Graduate School of Education

    What will it mean to teach and learn in an AI-powered world? Can we use artificial intelligence to enhance, but not replace, the best of what humans do?

    Recorded live in Los Angeles at Stanford’s Open Minds event, this episode of School’s In dives into how AI is reshaping education – its promises, pitfalls, and surprises. Dan and Denise welcome Stanford faculty members Judith Ellen Fan, a cognitive scientist, and Christopher Piech, a computer scientist, to the stage for a lively discussion that ranges from motivation and creativity to assessment and cheating. Together, they explore the deeply human elements of human learning and AI design, and the ways that Stanford is shaping the conversation about how humans and machines learn together. They cover several topics, including:

  • Why One-on-One Tutoring Outperforms Two-on-One

    | FutureEd

    A new study by Stanford researchers Hsiaolin Hsieh, David Gormley, Carly D. Robinson, and Susanna Loeb suggests why one-on-one tutoring has been found to produce double the gains in student learning than two-on-one tutoring.

    Analyzing 16,629 transcripts from 2022-23 school year tutoring sessions from an earlier study that established the greater gains under one-on-one tutoring, the researchers examined how tutors allocated their time and attention across both one-on-one and two-on-one formats. The tutoring sessions focused on early literacy and served kindergarten through second grade students, with 510 students receiving one-on-one tutoring and 570 students receiving two-on-one tutoring. All students met with their tutor online for 20 minutes during the school day, four times per week.

  • Why Hasn’t Tutoring Been More Effective?

    | Education Week

    The most recent of these, from researchers at Stanford University’s SCALE Initiative, examined math and reading tutoring programs in a large, urban district during the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years. Neither led to overall gains in academic achievement.

    But when researchers dug deeper into the data, they identified implementation problems that could be driving these null effects.

    The findings add to a growing body of evidence around tutoring in a post-COVID landscape that suggests the effectiveness of a program hinges on the nitty-gritty details of how it is run—how often students meet with their tutors, for instance, or whether lessons are tailored to their specific needs.

    Studying these implementation details could help school systems build more effective tutoring initiatives in the long run, said Elizabeth Huffaker, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Florida, and the lead author on the SCALE paper.

  • ‘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.”