Before the pandemic, almost 100 studies pointed to math or reading gains for students paired with a tutor at least three times a week and using a proven curriculum or set of lesson plans, according to a Hechinger Report article.
Some students gained an extra year’s worth of learning, comparing test scores of tutored students against those who weren’t. The expense sometimes surpassed $4,000 a year per student for high-dosage tutoring.
Researchers are rigorously studying large-scale tutoring efforts and testing whether effective tutoring can be done more cheaply. Researchers studied more than 20,000 students in Miami; Chicago; Atlanta; Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; schools throughout New Mexico, and a California charter school network. This was also a randomized controlled study: 9,000 students were randomly assigned to get tutoring and compared with 11,000 students who didn’t get extra help.
Preliminary results were “sobering,” according to a June report by the University of Chicago Education Lab and MDRC, a research organization.
Tutoring during the 2023-24 school year delivered one or two months’ worth of extra learning in reading or math, far less than what pre-pandemic research had produced. The problem: “We still see that the dosage students are getting falls far short of what would be needed to fully realize the promise of high-dosage tutoring,” the report said.
Schools struggle to set up large tutoring programs, says Monica Bhatt, a researcher at the University of Chicago Education Lab and one of the report’s authors. Effective high-dosage tutoring involves big changes to bell schedules and classroom space, along with the challenge of hiring and training tutors.
“After you spend lots of people’s money and lots of time and effort, things don’t always go the way you hope. There’s a lot of fires to put out at the beginning or throughout because teachers or tutors aren’t doing what you want, or the hiring isn’t going well,” says Philip Oreopoulos, an economist at the University of Toronto, whose 2020 review of tutoring evidence influenced policymakers.
Another reason for lackluster results: schools offered a lot of extra help to everyone after the pandemic, even to students who didn’t receive tutoring. In pre-pandemic research, students in the “business as usual” control group often received no extra help at all, making the difference between tutoring and no tutoring far more stark.
The report indicated that cheaper tutoring models are worth testing. The cheaper models averaged $1,200 per student and had tutors working with eight students at a time, often combining online practice work with human attention. More expensive models averaged $2,000 per student and had tutors working with three to four students at once. Many pre-pandemic tutoring programs involved smaller 1-to-1 or 2-to-1 student-to-tutor ratios.
Educators shouldn’t give up, say researchers. “High-dosage tutoring is still a district or state’s best bet to improve student learning, given that the learning impact per minute of tutoring is largely robust,” the report concludes. “Our recommendation for the field is to focus on increasing dosage — and learning gains,” Bhatt says.
Researchers are focused on targeting a limited amount of tutoring to the right students instead of tutoring the masses. The aim is to understand which tutoring models work for which kinds of students.
Hechinger Report
