Does high-dosage tutoring really work?
It’s a question that’s been dominating conversations in education circles in recent years — ever since a 2022 challenge was issued by U.S. Secretary of Education Michael Cardona to reverse learning loss created by COVID-19’s disruption to the education system.
“We cannot expect classroom teachers to do it all themselves,” Secretary Michael Cardona said at the time, calling on American school districts to provide 90 hours of targeted, intensive tutoring each week to students who’d fallen behind during the pandemic.
More than two and a half years after the federal announcement, nearly 40 percent of America’s public school districts now provide high-dosage tutoring to students, and some states like Ohio and Virginia have even passed legislation that turns Cardona’s suggestion into a legal mandate for certain students.
For districts weighing whether or not to follow suit, the question of whether or not high-dosage tutoring works has been taken up by neuroscientists, economic policy experts, and more to help them decide.
Here’s what the experts say differentiates high-dosage (also called high-impact or high-dose) tutoring from other types.
What Is High-Dosage Tutoring?
Though the high-dosage tutoring definitions used in educational circles vary from organization to organization, all make clear this model is markedly different from, say, a peer-tutoring program in which students get help from other students or even test prep tutoring programs with teachers providing instruction.
One of the most widely accepted definitions was created in 2021 by Susanna Loeb, a Stanford professor and director of Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA), and a group of fellow education policy experts from the University of Virginia and the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.
Together, they drafted a short list of design principles they say are necessary in order to create a hiqh-quality high-dosage tutoring program. Those principles, and the experts’ descriptions of each, are as follows:
- Frequency — Tutoring is most likely to be effective when delivered in high doses through tutoring programs with three or more sessions per week or intensive, week-long “vacation academy” small-group programs taught by talented teachers.
- Group Size — Tutors can effectively instruct up to three or four students at a time. However, moving beyond this number can quickly become small group instruction, which is less personalized and requires a higher degree of skill to do well. One-on-one tutoring is optimal if possible.
- Personnel — Because the skills required for tutoring are different from the skills required for effective classroom teaching, a wide variety of tutors (including volunteers and college students) can successfully improve student outcomes, if they receive adequate training and ongoing support.
- Focus — Researchers have found tutoring to be effective at all grade levels— even for high school students who have fallen quite far behind. The evidence is strongest, with the most research available, for reading-focused tutoring for students in early grades (particularly grades K-2) and for math-focused tutoring for older students.
- Measurement — Tutoring programs that support data use and ongoing informal assessments allow tutors to more effectively tailor their instruction for individual students.
- Relationships — Ensuring students have a consistent tutor over time may facilitate positive tutor-student relationships and a stronger understanding of students’ learning needs.
- Curriculum — Using high-quality instructional materials that are aligned with classroom content allows tutors to reinforce and support teachers’ classroom instruction.
- Scheduling — Tutoring interventions that are conducted during the school day tend to result in greater learning gains than those that are after school or during the summer.
- Delivery Model — Most research has focused on in-person tutoring, but there is emerging evidence that tutoring can be effective when delivered virtually.
- Prioritization — Framing of tutoring programs matters when prioritizing students to participate. Programs that target lower-performing students can support those students who most need personalized instruction but have the potential to create a negative stigma where tutoring is perceived as a punishment. Programs that target all students in a lower-performing grade level or school benefit from broader organizational commitment and the perception that tutoring is for everyone (but are more costly).
The NSSA also specifies that other personalized instruction models — such as pull-out services or in-class small group instruction by a second teacher — do not qualify as high-dosage tutoring.
If you plan to apply for state funding to cover all or even just some of your students’ tutoring service costs, it’s important to examine your state department of education’s criteria, which often require one or more of these principles to be true. For example:
- Arkansas — The Arkansas LEARNS Act requires high-dosage tutoring be offered during the school day to qualify for funding.
- Ohio — In order to be considered a high-quality tutoring vendor in Ohio, sessions must be “embedded in the school day or immediately after,” and the program must include “coordination with classroom teachers.”
- New Jersey — A definition of high-dosage tutoring outlined as part of the Garden State’s High-Impact Tutoring Grant program calls for “three or more sessions per week.”
- Virginia — Among other requirements, Virginia mandates high-dosage tutoring be delivered “five days per week over a sustained period” under its All in Tutoring program.
What School Leaders Say About High-Dosage Tutoring
So …what do the leaders putting high-dosage tutoring to work in their schools and districts think? Does high-dosage tutoring work?
School leaders across the country say it does, and it’s helping their students.
Leaders in 52 percent of the schools providing high-dosage tutoring to students during the 2023-24 school year said it was “very, or extremely effective.”
Source: National Center for Education Statistics’ School Pulse Panel survey; May 2024
School leader approval for high-dosage tutoring vastly outweighed all other types of tutoring. Meanwhile, encouraging data continues to flow in from districts that have implemented a high-impact model in the wake of the pandemic.
Researchers at the University of Chicago have found high-dosage tutoring is successfully reversing pandemic-related learning loss in math, and data released by the Tennessee Department of Education at the end of the ‘21-’22 school year showed high-dosage tutoring to help at-risk readers was paying dividends. Tennessee students hit new five-year records in reading achievement a year into its pandemic-fueled high-impact tutoring program, and English proficiency rates in the state have returned to pre-pandemic levels among all students, including those from low-income households.
What the High-Dosage Tutoring Research Says
School leaders aren’t alone in their support for this tutoring model. High-dosage tutoring research details decades of success — from a 1984 small-group tutoring program meant to help upper elementary students with their social skills to a volunteer-based model implemented in the early 2000s to help first graders boost reading scores in Florida.
The Reading Research
Researchers from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, the National Bureau of Economic Research and more have spent extensive amounts of time over the years evaluating whether high-dosage tutoring can be used by schools to help students become fluent readers. Here’s what they’ve found:
- High-impact tutoring is one of the few school-based interventions with “demonstrated large positive effects on both math and reading.”
- The high-dosage tutoring model is as much as 15 times more effective at improving students’ reading skills than standard tutoring models.
- Because younger students have shorter attention spans than their older peers, “short bursts” of high-dosage tutoring — like the 15-minute sessions offered by Ignite Reading — can be extremely effective.
- Phonics taught via one-to-one tutoring yields effects that last into the upper elementary grades.
- High-dosage tutoring can be more beneficial for at-risk readers than other intervention methods such as small group tutorials, classroom instructional process approaches, and computer-assisted instruction.
- Johns Hopkins researchers found one-to-one high-dosage tutoring is more effective than other reading interventions, including computer-driven tutorials and small group interventions.
The Math Research
There’s also extensive research that’s focused on the impact this highly targeted, intensive method of tutoring can have on students’ growth in math.
- High-impact tutoring has been found to be 20 times more effective than standard tutoring models for math.
- A National Bureau of Economic Research analysis of more than 100 studies determined math tutoring is more effective for students in 2nd through 5th grade than it is for younger students.
- A 2021 study found high school students can learn two to three times as much math as their peers from a daily dose of tutoring at school.
Other Positive High-Dosage Tutoring Impacts
Positive impacts on math and reading growth aren’t the only benefits, according to researchers.
- High-dosage tutoring has been found to improve student attendance by as much as 7 percent.
- By providing high-dose tutoring during the school day, researchers have found schools are able to improve student equity, removing barriers that would otherwise prevent many of the students who could benefit most from receiving the targeted instruction.
About Ignite Reading
Ignite Reading delivers 1:1 online tutoring to students who need extra support in learning to read. Our expert tutors teach students the foundational skills they need to become confident, fluent readers by the end of 1st grade.
With a team of literacy specialists and highly trained tutors, we provide daily, targeted instruction that quickly closes decoding gaps, so students can successfully make the transition from learning to read to reading to learn.
