Tag: Implementation

Tutoring report and guide for community-based organizations

By Jennifer Krajewski, Johns Hopkins University

A new report from Accelerate and ProvenTutoring tells the story of seven community-based organizations (CBOs) who partnered with schools to implement high-dosage, in-person tutoring programs during the school day across a range of contexts and using various approaches. It synthesizes the successes, challenges, and lessons learned during the planning, implementation, and evaluation process. The report provides guidance and raises key questions about supporting community-based organizations in scaling their tutoring models.

The report suggests that CBOs have a vital role to play in the scaling and sustaining of high-dosage, in-person, school day tutoring to address pandemic learning loss and longstanding inequities. Their local knowledge, relationships, expertise in delivering other community programs, and resources make them valuable school partners. A few of the report’s main points are as follows:

Clarity on Tutoring Goals: CBOs and their school partners need to agree on what they are hoping to achieve and use those goals to guide planning and implementation.
Support in Tutor Recruitment and Training: CBOs can provide valuable support in recruiting, training, and supporting invested adults to serve as tutors.
Adopting Proven Models: CBOs and school partners should adopt a proven, high-dosage tutoring model because it offers the greatest promise of impact on learning outcomes. Building your own model requires an enormous amount of trial and error to make the program effective. It is generally beyond the expertise of CBOs to adapt school materials or develop its own content.
Continuous Improvement: Getting tutoring right is challenging. A commitment to continuous improvement, guided by evidence, is necessary to ensure that high-dosage tutoring achieves the desired outcomes.

A companion step-by-step guide is also available for organizations planning to implement tutoring.

Considerations when building a school-based vision program

By Chenchen Shi, Department of Theatre Pedagogy, The Central Academy of Drama, China

Pediatric vision care continues to be an unmet need in the United States, leading to disparities in access to these crucial services. Serving as an evidence-based intervention to advance health equity, school-based vision programs (SBVPs) aim to offer vision care services directly within the school setting. By forging partnerships between schools and eye care providers, SBVPs have demonstrated their ability to make a substantial impact on children’s lives, including improving academic performance and facilitating the use of eyeglasses, particularly among urban minority populations.

Despite the proven effectiveness of SBVPs, there is currently a lack of resources and comprehensive guides to assist school nurses, administrators, eye care providers, and other stakeholders in establishing and operating SBVPs. Megan Collins and her team published an article in the Journal of School Nursing, which provided practical considerations relevant to the building or strengthening of existing SBVPs.

During the program planning phase, it is essential to prioritize needs analysis, strategic partnerships, and securing adequate funding. During program implementation, components such as personnel, consent for vision exams, vision screening, eye exams, dispensing, monitoring, and replacing eyeglasses, and how to charge for exams should be fully considered. For sustainability, stakeholders need to consider data management, tracking and quality assurance. In conclusion, this article points out that SBVPs require a strong partnership between school health staff, teachers, and vision care providers in each phase. Due to school nurses’ strong ties to school health care services and the school community, they are especially positioned to build SBVPs.

Tutoring implementation: A review

By Kaya Feng, Johns Hopkins University

The Covid-19 pandemic interrupted student learning to various extents in the past two years. Many studies demonstrate that tutoring programs where students receive small-group or one-to-one academic support are effective in improving academic achievement. However, there are few reviews that summarize the evidence on these programs’ implementation. A group of researchers at Brown University conducted a systematic review of 40 studies to synthesize how tutoring is implemented and experienced.

This review provides three findings: 1) There are five conceptualizations of tutoring in the reviewed studies, which are not mutually exclusive: a. Tutoring is aimed at facilitating the development of academic skills and cultivation of positive attitudes toward learning; b. Tutoring is innovative in that it redistributes power and instructional roles; c. Tutoring scaffolds pre-service teachers getting prepared for classroom instruction; d. Tutoring serves as a marketplace where tutors compete to provide accessible tutoring resources of high quality; e. Tutoring services can better cater to students’ and parents’ demands through community partnerships. 2) Tutoring implementation and experiences can be related to several factors: a. How available quality tutoring providers are; b. How accessible accurate and actionable data on the effectiveness of tutoring programs is; c. How interested students and families are in tutoring; d. How capable of implementing tutoring administrators are; e. How high the level of school principals’ buy-in of tutoring programs is; f. How students are selected for tutoring programs and what the patterns of student take-up are; g. How flexible tutoring programs’ schedules and settings are; h. How well-established student-tutor relationships are. 3) Tutoring can influence students and tutors in various ways: a. Tutoring’s effects on students vary with the design and implementation of tutoring programs; b. Some tutors got more prepared and passionate in their careers while some others did not. This review provides valuable information on the elements influencing tutoring implementation and indicates directions for further research.

Online tutoring? You get what you pay for

By Qiyang Zhang, Johns Hopkins University

In-person and high-dosage tutoring is gaining popularity among practitioners as an evidence-based approach to accelerate learning in the post-pandemic education system. Facing the challenge of insufficient funding and lack of local tutors to provide in-person tutoring, some practitioners regard online tutoring as an alternative outlet. However, there is limited research to establish the effectiveness of online tutoring programs. To investigate this topic of increasing interest, Dr. Kraft and his colleagues conducted a pilot study and found answers align with conventional wisdom.

This pilot study recruited 230 volunteer college student tutors from 47 highly selective universities to deliver one-to-one online tutoring using Zoom. All tutors participated in a three-hour training session before the intervention and weekly peer-mentoring sessions during the intervention. The 560 participants were 6th-8th grade students from Chicago. Almost all of them come from low-income households. The study randomly assigned students to treatment condition or control condition within each grade level. Students in treatment received online tutoring while students in control participated in regular advisory period activities. The intervention was delivered in the spring of 2021 for 12 weeks with an intended dosage of two 30-minute sessions each week.

In terms of implementation, there were significant challenges. Students were meant to receive 9 hours of tutoring, but on average received 3.1 hours. Many students (18%) received no tutoring at all. To measure impacts on student achievement, researchers used scores on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness and the i-Ready tests. Analyses showed that online tutoring produced positive but statistically insignificant results on math (ES = +0.07) and reading (ES = +0.04). Compared to in-person tutoring programs’ effect sizes reported Nickow et al.’s meta-analysis (2020), this online tutoring model only produced around a third of the effects. While the extreme low costs of such online tutoring remain highly attractive to policymakers, the authors also cautioned that free-of-charge online college tutors may not be sustainable, replicable, or scalable when universities switch from remote to in-person.