Prominent members of the education research community are enthusiastically pushing for a dramatic increase in tutoring to address coronavirus shutdown learning loss among U.S. schoolchildren. They include the University of Michigan's Susan Dynarski, Johns Hopkins University’s Robert Slavin and Brown University’s Matthew Kraft.

I wanted to recap what high-quality experiments say about how much tutoring can realistically help kids catch up and what kinds of people can be good tutors.

●      A 2016 Harvard meta-analysis argues for high-dosage tutoring, such as daily sessions, to help low-performing students make big catch up gains. Weekly sessions were not very effective.

●      In two new meta-analyses from Robert Slavin, director of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University, several tutoring programs posted effect sizes of 0.4 standard deviations or more, a statistical unit that he compared to five additional months of school over and above what students would have learned without the tutoring.

●      No well-designed experiments in tutoring achieved anything close to Benjamin Bloom’s oft-cited “2 sigma” or standard deviations study of 1984.

●      Strong gains were produced by programs that provide all the tutoring materials and a clear step-by-step process for tutors to follow and repeat.

●      Novice tutors, even new college graduates, performed effectively in studies. Certified teachers weren’t necessary to get strong results from tutoring

Slavin, Robert. A Synthesis of Quantitative Research on Programs For Struggling Readers in Elementary Schools (submitted for publication, previously posted on the Best Evidence Encyclopedia website www.bestevidence.org)

Slavin, Robert. Effective Programs in Elementary Mathematics: A Meta-Analysis (submitted for publication, previously posted on the Best Evidence in Education Encyclopedia website www.bestevidence.org)

Kuhfeld, M. & Tarasawa, B. (2020). The COVID-19 slide: What summer learning loss can tell us about the potential impact of school closures on student academic achievement. NWEA.

Roseanna Ander, Jonathan Guryan, Jens Ludwig (2016) Improving Academic Outcomes for Disadvantaged Students: Scaling Up Individualized Tutorials. The Hamilton Project.

Roland G. Fryer J, Howard-Noveck M. High-Dosage Tutoring and Reading Achievement: Evidence from New York City. Journal of Labor Economics. Forthcoming.

Bloom, B. S. 1984. “The 2-Stigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-On-One Tutoring.” Educational Researcher 13 (6): 4–16.

Kraft, Matthew (August 20, 2015) “What If Every Struggling Student Had a Tutor?” Education Week

Robert Balfanz and Vaughan Byrnes (May 20, 2020) “Connecting Social-Emotional Development, Academic Achievement, and On-Track Outcomes” Everyone Graduates Center, Center for Social Organization of Schools, Johns Hopkins School of Education