Grant Recipient: Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
Term: 2023 — 2025
Principal Investigators: Susanna Loeb, Stanford University and Carly D. Robinson, Stanford University
Funding: $295,912
Summary: This project is a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate an online tutoring program for elementary school students, aimed at improving math and English Language Arts (ELA) achievement. The program will use live online tutoring where licensed teachers will provide instruction in math and ELA skills. The program will be delivered in small groups of 3 – 5 students for 30 – 60 minutes, several times a week, for one semester.
This project will complement AV’s large investments both in tutoring interventions and in building a research agenda that can identify effective and scalable tutoring models, for example, to Accelerate. This program builds on the broader evidence on high dosage tutoring, and the study will provide valuable evidence on the efficacy of virtual high-dosage tutoring, for which there is comparatively less rigorous evidence to date.
Under the project, the researchers will recruit a sample of approximately 1,500 struggling students in Kindergarten through 5th grade in 11 elementary schools in a large public school district. In the fall of the school year 2023 – 2024, students will be randomly assigned to either a treatment group offered Tutored by Teachers or a control group that will receive services as usual. The study will use end-of-year assessments to measure math and ELA achievement outcomes at the end of the school year, with a possibility of extension for an additional year.
The study’s pre-specified analysis plan is linked here.
