In the wake of the pandemic, schools across the country are facing an urgent crisis in student achievement. Most students require at least three years of study to regain lost academic learning. The detrimental effects of the pandemic have been even more pronounced among our country’s most vulnerable students, including those who are most economically disadvantaged.
In response to the coronavirus crisis, the federal government has committed $190 billion in stimulus support to the K-12 public education system through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund. ESSER funding gave local leaders broad authority to select educational interventions to address pandemic learning loss, including high-volume tutoring, small group interventions, after-school programs, and extended school years. Many of these leaders have invested in tutoring.
However, questions have recently been raised about whether the increased investment in high-volume private education is driven by questionable science. Paul T. von Hippel introduced Benjamin Bloom's influential 1984 article that argued that tutoring could increase student achievement by two standard deviations (see “Two-Sigma Tutoring: Separating Science Fiction from Science Fact”). characteristic, Spring 2024) This is analogous to moving the average student (50th percentile) to the 98th percentile of the achievement distribution. “The idea that tutoring consistently increases achievement by two standard deviations is both exaggerated and oversimplified,” von Hippel concluded. Frederick Hess wrote: forbes That amount of gain is “remarkable, representing more than a year’s worth of learning for elementary school students and about five years’ worth of learning for high school students.” Hess acknowledges that “tutoring can be a powerful tool,” but suggests that “the same can be said for many other strategies to improve schooling.”
I agree with Hess that tutoring can be a powerful tool. And to be sure, Bloom's oft-quoted claim that private tutoring reliably improves student achievement by two standard deviations is grossly exaggerated. At the same time, we must not let debunking these myths blind us to the fact that, among a wide range of educational interventions, private tutoring has the greatest impact on student learning.
Here's what we know:
In a recent peer-reviewed meta-analysis of 89 randomized controlled trials of tutoring interventions, Andre Nickow and co-authors showed that the average impact of tutoring on student achievement was 0.29 SD, or about four months of additional learning for a typical elementary school student. give. Based on a study of tutoring providers who provided services to students in subject areas at different grade levels and different types of teachers (e.g., teachers, paraprofessionals, parents) between 1985 and 2019, these results show that tutoring: It has been shown to significantly outperform other educational interventions, including: reduced class size (0.13–0.20 SD); Vacation Academy (0.06–0.16 SD); summer school (.08–.09 SD); Extended school days/year (0.05 SD). As Hess suggests, tutoring is not “an education boom triggered by research findings that later turned out to be exaggerated, incomplete, or colored by wishful thinking,” but rather an intervention with a wealth of evidence supporting it as well as its effectiveness for improving students. . However, it has a relative advantage over other strategies for supporting academic recovery after the pandemic.
It would be a mistake to exaggerate research findings. Tutoring is not a panacea and cannot close the achievement gap overnight. The impact of private education on student achievement varies greatly. For example, private tutoring has the potential to double the annual growth in high school math achievement, but much more is needed to identify and expand private tutoring providers that meaningfully improve student achievement for students at different educational levels and across different grade levels. It takes effort. This may vary depending on needs (e.g. students with dyslexia) and different school settings. More evidence is needed to determine which characteristics of tutoring program design, including type of tutoring (e.g., teacher or college student), modality (face-to-face, virtual, or hybrid), and student-to-student, are associated with improved student achievement. -Tutor ratio.
At Accelerate, we are developing an extensive research portfolio focused on the design, implementation, and ultimately the impact of tutoring on student achievement to support ongoing knowledge generation in the field. Our goal is to identify effective tutoring models that can meaningfully improve student achievement and scale to enable the 10% or more students nationally who currently receive high-volume tutoring to do so. We believe that evidence and return on investment should be key factors informing how educational leaders select interventions. Given the challenges of student learning loss our country currently faces, tutoring remains one of the best ways to accelerate learning recovery and close persistent achievement gaps.