The pandemic left plummeting test scores in its wake, especially in math.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results from last year returned historically big declines in scores for fourth and eighth graders in math, leading to fears that catching students up would prove difficult.
The good news is that this particular malady has a prescription for treatment: “high-dose” tutoring — a concentrated form of small-group study that meets multiple times per week.
Just this spring, researchers from the University of Chicago published results in the journal American Economic Review from two randomized controlled trials of Saga Education’s tutoring in Chicago Public Schools under the slightly disquieting title “Not Too Late: Improving Academic Outcomes among Adolescents.”
The trials showed that for low-income ninth and 10th graders, high-dose tutoring led to a “sizeable” improvement (0.18 to 0.40 standard deviations) in math scores but also an improvement in scores for other subjects. What’s better, the improvements lasted: One-to-two years after tutoring, the bump was still there.
It’s a notch for Saga Education, a nonprofit that specializes in high-impact tutoring. Stripped down to its essence, the organization focuses on “deeply integrating” tutoring into the regular school day, and making sure that tutoring has high-quality instructional content that aligns with grade-level standards and is designed to support classroom teachers, says Saga cofounder AJ Gutierrez. Schools pay Saga, often through grants, for access to its design and tutoring support services, like the nonprofit’s tutoring “fellows.”
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