Research Studies
An AI-powered tutoring assistant increased human tutors’ capacity to help students through math problems and improved students’ performance in math, according to a Stanford University study.
The digital tool, Tutor CoPilot, was created by Stanford researchers to guide tutors, especially novices, in their interactions with students.
The study is the first randomized controlled trial to examine a human-AI partnership in live tutoring, according to the researchers. The study examines whether the tool is effective for improving tutors’ skills and students’ math learning.
Students whose tutors used Tutor CoPilot were 4 percentage points more likely to progress through math tutoring session assessments successfully compared to students whose tutors did not have AI assistance, the study found.
The approach particularly benefited lower-rated and less-experienced tutors, researchers said. Students of lower-rated tutors who used the AI assistance increased their math proficiency up to 9 percentage points on average compared to students learning from lower-rated tutors without AI assistance.
The study included 900 tutors and 1,800 elementary and secondary school students from a large school district in the South. Stanford partnered with tutoring company FEV Tutor to pilot the tool’s implementation.
Here’s how it works: A tutor presents a subtraction problem to a student. If the student answers incorrectly, the tutor can activate Tutor CoPilot, which will recommend that the tutor ask the student to identify the numbers in the problem or suggest the student draw the items that need to be subtracted.
An AI-powered digital tutoring assistant designed by Stanford University researchers shows modest promise at improving students’ short-term performance in math, suggesting that the best use of artificial intelligence in virtual tutoring for now might be in supporting, not supplanting, human instructors.
The open-source tool, which researchers say other educators can recreate and integrate into their tutoring systems, made the human tutors slightly more effective. And the weakest tutors became nearly as effective as their more highly-rated peers, according to a study released Monday.
You can’t argue with data. Research shows that high-dosage tutoring is one of the most effective ways to help students make academic progress. Yet few students actually receive it. A recent study from Stanford University demonstrated the many positive effects of tutoring, including increased reading and math scores, attendance and a feeling of belonging. Teach For America’s (TFA) tutoring program, the Ignite Fellowship, finds and develops tutors who connect virtually with students during the school day. Fellows, who are paid for their work, are supported by a school-based veteran educator to customize instruction. Seventy-one percent of the 3,500 students across the country being tutored by Ignite fellows meet their semester-long reading and math goals.
Since 2022, public schools in the District of Columbia have been working to mitigate Covid learning disruptions by establishing and ramping up high-impact tutoring (HIT) efforts. Data on the outcome of these efforts are beginning to emerge, and a new report from the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) shows some minimally encouraging signs.
NSSA is an offshoot of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and Systems Change for Advancing Learning and Equity, an initiative focused on researching how tutoring can best benefit students. Its new report looks at the first full year of HIT implementation in D.C. schools during 2022–23. Tutoring efforts that year concentrated on math and English language arts (ELA) for students in all grades and was focused on schools—both district and charter—with the greatest concentrations of students identified as at risk. It’s interesting to note that “at risk” doesn’t generally mean academic risk for schools in the district, but rather centers primarily on student socioeconomic status and homelessness, in the context of this wholly-academic intervention. Pre-existing academic need appears not to have been a driving force in choosing where tutors were placed, although some data suggest that academic performance may have influenced teachers’ decisions on which students to refer for tutoring.
“This is most likely to happen if parents both want this and believe that they can get this – and deserve to get this – at school,” says Susanna Loeb, a professor of education at Stanford University in California.
Amid the flurry of activity in recent years, researchers and policy advocates are increasingly pointing to a specific kind of tutoring as the most effective. Known as “high-impact” or “high-dosage,” it generally refers to tutoring that happens at least three times a week for 30-minute sessions with groups of four or fewer students. And if it occurs during the regular school day? Even better.
Research reveals the most effective ways to help young struggling readers through tutoring.
Tutoring has gained popularity as a strategy to improve the academic achievement of struggling students. Intensive, relationship-based tutoring is a highly effective academic support for many students, particularly in the early elementary years when school schedules and classroom routines are flexible (Groom-Thomas et al., 2023). For schools considering how to begin tutoring or where to prioritize resources, early literacy tutoring — which is both effective and feasible — is a good place to start.
New research from Stanford University has brought a ray of hope for Washington, D.C.’s students, especially Black children and those from low-income families. The research revealed that the city’s substantial investment in a tutoring initiative has borne fruit in its first year, significantly boosting academic performance and narrowing the persistent gaps in reading and math that have disproportionately affected these groups.
A new Stanford University report examines the first year of D.C.'s multimillion-dollar effort to get students back on track.
D.C. students who got frequent, small group tutoring improved their reading and math scores after the return to inperson classes, attended more classes and had a stronger sense of belonging at school, according to new research into the city's multimillion-dollar tutoring program.
The findings from Stanford University are encouraging, researchers said: Although students have yet to fully recover from the pandemic-induced slump that saw test scores plummet and absenteeism rise, children in D.C. are making progress.
Notably, research by Susanna Loeb (Stanford University) revealed that tutoring methods and strategies can vary dramatically both in their design features and student outcomes. Loeb’s team of researchers discovered that in particular “high impact” tutoring strategies have demonstrated statistically significant effects on student learning in math and reading. High impact tutoring contains the following features:
- One-on-one tutoring (or with very small groups)
- Tutoring content is aligned with in-class instruction
- Students receive tutoring at least three times per week from the same tutor
- Tutors are professionally trained
Another study of more than 2,000 elementary school children in Texas tested the difference between one-to-one and two-to-one online tutoring during the 2022-23 school year. These were young, low-income children, in kindergarten through 2nd grade, who were just learning to read. Children who were randomly assigned to get one-to-one tutoring four times a week posted small gains on one test, but not on another, compared to students in a comparison group who didn’t get tutoring. First graders assigned to one-to-one tutoring gained the equivalent of 30 additional days of school. By contrast, children who had been tutored in pairs were statistically no different in reading than the comparison group of untutored children. A draft paper about this study, led by researchers from Stanford University, was posted to the Annenberg website in May 2024.
As excitement grows around tutoring as a strategy to combat learning loss, advocates have rightly been encouraged by the growing body of evidence demonstrating the efficacy of tutoring interventions. To date, however, little research has examined the impact of fully virtual tutoring on very young students. Hardly a technicality, this distinction matters because younger children are less likely to have the technical and self-regulation skills upon which virtual learning depends. Now, a new study by researchers from Stanford, Vanderbilt, and UnboundED analyzes the benefits of virtual tutoring specifically for early elementary students.
Less than a third of Colorado eighth-graders score proficiently in math. So, Colorado has invested heavily in high-impact tutoring programs — $20 million allocated in federal and state dollars since the pandemic. Colorado was also one of five states to get a $1 million grant from Accelerate, a nonprofit that aims to make
Tutoring is a win-win job for college and K-12 students, but the question remains how best to connect college students who need these jobs with the paid tutoring positions available. In a recent working paper with colleagues, we report on a randomized controlled trial that tested whether highlighting the different benefits of a tutoring job can drive changes in tutor applications and employment. We partnered with Grand Valley State University (GVSU) to recruit paid tutors for a campus initiative started in 2020 to support Michigan K-12 students. Tutoring at GVSU was not only a paid position—it was a highly paid position on campus. Tutors could earn up to $17.70 per hour, the highest rate in the GVSU student hourly wage range and well above the state minimum wage at the time of the study ($10.10).