Intensive tutoring is supposed to be one of the most effective routes to raise student achievement. But it doesn’t always work out that way.
While meta-analyses of studies on high-dosage tutoring programs find big, positive impacts on learning, it’s often challenging for districts to implement these time- and labor-intensive initiatives in practice. Recent studies of post-pandemic tutoring programs have shown smaller-than-expected gains, or even no student improvement at all.
Could a lighter touch tutoring program be easier for schools to maintain, and still move the needle on student achievement? One new study suggests yes.
The paper comes from researchers at the National Student Support Accelerator, a program of the SCALE Initiative at Stanford University that studies high-impact tutoring. They tested a tutoring intervention called Chapter One, in which part-time tutors delivered 5-10 minute lessons throughout the school day, while students were still in their regular classrooms.
Researchers followed students as the district ran the program for four years, from kindergarten through 3rd grade.
The program didn’t require the district to hire additional staff or change their schedule to allow for blocks of tutoring throughout the day. It cost about $416 per student per year, less than half as much as other intensive tutoring models that were implemented elsewhere in the country at the same time.
Still, students made progress. Those who had been randomly assigned to the tutoring group scored higher than their peers on state standardized tests in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades. By the end of the four years, the tutoring group was also less likely to have an individualized education program or be retained.
“There is a lot of evidence saying that intensive tutoring works if implementation is good. But implementation is very difficult,” said Jilli Jung, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, and the lead author on the study.
This lower-lift model of tutoring could offer a practical way for districts to support students across multiple years, she said.
The test score gains in this study are smaller than those in other recent studies of high-dosage tutoring interventions—between 0.12 and 0.17 standard deviations, compared with 0.29 standard deviations in a 2024 meta-analysis, for example.
“It’s harder to expect large effects when the intervention is small, but a lot easier to implement,” said Jung. Still, the improvements in this study are meaningful, in part because they’re more feasible for most schools, she said.
How much tutoring time is enough?
The research literature that finds so-called high-dosage tutoring effective usually examines programs with a specific set of characteristics: Tutors meet one-on-one or in small groups with students for at least 30 minutes, three or more times a week.
This kind of tutoring is effective, but expensive and often hard to set up and maintain, as many districts found during the pandemic. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics has also found that it’s relatively rare. While most schools report offering at least some tutoring for low-performing students, only 37% said they offered high-dose tutoring, according to a 2022 survey.
The Chapter One program in the National Student Support Accelerator study worked differently.
Within kindergarten classrooms, students were randomly assigned to participate in either the tutoring group or receive business-as-usual instruction.
In the tutoring group, part-time tutors taught short lessons in decoding, splitting their time among students in the classroom. On average, students had 2.5 sessions each week for a total of 15 minutes weekly. Tutors devoted more time to students with the highest needs, but this time allocation shifted based on regular assessments of students’ skills.
Students also had 10 minutes of daily practice on an online platform, aligned to the skills they worked on with their tutors.
The program represents a somewhat unusual model, said Jung—less intensive than high-dosage tutoring, but more regular and structured than one-off sessions that research has shown don’t boost student outcomes long-term.
“We don’t know much about the perfect dosage for young kids,” Jung said.
The National Student Support Accelerator offers general guidance that lessons last for 30-60 minutes, but also recommends that younger students “may benefit from shorter but more frequent sessions.”
The study suggests that districts could benefit from some programs that chart a middle path, said Jung. “They don’t have to choose between no tutoring and very expensive, intensive tutoring.”
