When comparing and selecting tutoring programs, both the hours of extra support needed to improve student learning and the related costs should be considered, according to research released Tuesday from nonprofit Accelerate.
Accelerate said its recommended metrics for analyzing tutoring efficiency and cost-effectiveness will help future researchers assess the return on investment for tutoring programs. This will, in turn, allow school leaders to make evidence-based decisions when investing in tutoring programs.
"So the question researchers now need to answer is: How do we get the biggest bang for our buck?" said Nakia Towns, chief operating officer at Accelerate, in a statement. Accelerate provides grants and advocacy to scale proven tutoring models.
"The clearer we can make it for districts to see which interventions are the best use of their precious time and money, the more likely it is that they will choose programs that will really make a difference for kids,” Towns said.
The push to provide tutoring
Pandemic-related learning loss has caused schools to ramp up tutoring programs with individual or small group instruction. For the past four years, federal COVID recovery funding has been available for schools to use on tutoring services and other academic interventions.
While some research shows high-dosage tutoring has helped students make learning gains, school leaders have said determining tutoring's ROI has been difficult. Likewise, the logistics of fitting tutoring programs into the school day haven't been easy.
This school year, more than 80% of public schools report some type of tutoring support, according to the National Center for Education Statistics’ School Pulse Panel. For schools providing high-dosage tutoring, about 75% said it had been moderately, very or extremely effective, the NCES report found.
A report released by Accelerate in December found that high-dosage tutoring programs serving mostly students of color and low-income students need the space, technology and staffing to support the supplemental instruction.
Still a lot to learn
To construct a new approach for evaluating tutoring programs, Accelerate re-analyzed tutoring program impact data from 14 high-quality randomized controlled trials of 12 tutoring providers that have met certain outcomes for reading, literacy and math.
The model measures efficiency as the hours of tutoring necessary to improve student learning by one month. Cost-effectiveness is defined as the additional months of student learning gained at a cost of $1,000 per student.
In a hypothetical example, Accelerate explains that one provider is "significantly more cost effective" because it provided 13.5 additional months of learning for $1,000 per pupil, compared to other providers showing just over or less than two months of additional learning for the same cost.
In addition to the recommended metric for comparing tutoring programs, the most recent Accelerate report also found:
- Tutoring is the most effective academic intervention, ahead of reduced class sizes, summer school and extended school year.
- Tutoring efficiency varies across programs and subject areas.
- There is still more to learn about identifying tutoring providers that meaningfully improve student achievement for students at different grade levels, with different educational needs, and in different school environments. Additional research is needed to determine which tutoring program design features are associated with improved student achievement.
“Selecting a tutoring vendor is not the same thing as buying No. 2 pencils,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, in a statement. “There’s so much variation in these programs — how they work, what they offer — and it’s really important that policymakers move away from thinking about tutoring as a generic commodity."
