In fall 2020, a group of nationally recognized education experts launched the National Student Support Accelerator. In March 2021, we unveiled the Accelerator website with open-source tools and resources for tutoring organizations, schools, and districts that are easy to use, downloadable, and designed to make structuring, implementing and scaling high-impact tutoring programs as straightforward as possible.
To date the Accelerator has:
- Synthesized tutoring research into a Research Agenda including two sets of Priority Research Questions – Characteristics of Effective Tutoring and Scaling Tutoring to focus future research and issued a brief How to Gather Rigorous Evidence of Your Program’s Effectiveness
- Led the development of a set of Tutoring Quality Standards and an accompanying Tutor Quality Improvement System that provides a Self-Assessment Tool for tutoring programs to understand their level of alignment to standards and provides recommendations and materials for improvement. The Self-Assessment Tool will help you determine if you are ready to apply for our NSSA Program Design Badge, which recognizes tutoring providers who have aligned their program design with the research on high-impact tutoring.
- Released tools for practitioners, schools, districts and states to more easily create or improve high-impact tutoring efforts including
- Toolkit for Tutoring with supporting webinars designed to make it easy for tutoring organizations and districts to develop or improve their own High-Impact Tutoring program,
- District Playbook designed to make it easy for districts to design or partner with a provider to adopt High-Impact Tutoring across their district,
- Tutoring Database providing a searchable source for districts to identify potential tutoring provider partners and
- Cost Calculator to support districts and other educational institutions in understanding the costs of High-Impact Tutoring.
- Issued informational briefs including High-Impact Tutoring: Equitable and Effective Learning Acceleration, Policy Considerations for Tutoring, Using the American Rescue Plan Act Funding for High-Impact Tutoring
- Developed research partnerships across the nation to learn more about implementation challenges and solutions and effectiveness of tutoring program features;
- Provided strategic advising to a variety of thought leaders, practitioners, state and district leaders, and other decision makers including over 20,000 participants in High-Impact Tutoring webinars ; and
- Created a Tutoring Educator Advisory Group to ensure tools and materials meet the needs of educators in the classroom.
Currently, we are:
- Building a community amongst education leaders across the nation to learn from each other and more effectively implement high-impact tutoring;
- Providing materials and assistance to states, districts, tutoring organizations, and advocacy organizations to support their high-impact tutoring efforts;
- Continuing to add to tools and information briefs to make it easier to adopt and/or expand high-impact tutoring;
- Continuing to share new research results that allows this highly effective, relationship-based, individualized instruction to become more sustainable and embedded in our public education system for the long run.
As a result of this and other’s work, states such as Illinois, Texas, Colorado, Tennessee, and others are launching and expanding high-impact tutoring, thousands of education leaders understand the research and characteristics of high-impact tutoring, and new research across the country is focusing on learning more about how to make high-impact tutoring more effective, less costly, and easier to implement.
As we continue our work to increase access to high-impact tutoring to students in need, we encourage you to join us by getting involved!