Personalized Learning Initiative
Realizing the Promise of High Dosage Tutoring at Scale: Preliminary Evidence for the Field
RELEASED MARCH 2024 – Preliminary results from the Personalized Learning Initiative suggest that in-school high dosage tutoring programs are leading to large and positive effects on student learning in math – even when delivered in the aftermath of the pandemic and in diverse academic settings.
The Personalized Learning Initiative (PLI) is a moonshot to overcome pandemic learning loss and aims to bring high dosage tutoring to students nationwide.
Project overview
The Challenge
The once-a-century public health crisis created a once-a-century public education crisis. Thanks to the federal government’s “Operation Warp Speed,” the public health crisis is now mostly behind us. The same cannot be said for our public education emergency, which, despite $190 billion in federal aid to schools, has been slower to resolve—especially for the most disadvantaged children.
Why have we not made more progress in overcoming pandemic-induced learning loss?
Part of the issue is that the federal funding to schools was probably not enough to start with, even had those dollars been deployed optimally (equal to about a 6% increase in annual K-12 spending in the US). But it’s also the case that school districts have struggled to scale one of the only interventions capable of accelerating student learning enough to remedy pandemic learning losses: high-dosage tutoring.
Evidence on High Dosage Tutoring
A pre-pandemic study by our University of Chicago-based research team, in partnership with Chicago Public Schools and non-profit Saga Education, delivered tutoring to thousands of economically disadvantaged, predominantly Black and Brown students on Chicago’s South and West Sides. To make sure students participated, high-dosage tutoring was embedded into the school day for the entire school year. Tutoring involved small student-tutor ratios (2:1) and the use of trained recent college graduates or mid-career switchers who are willing to work at a public-service stipend to help hold costs down to make such an intensive intervention cost-feasible. The data show this type of tutoring can double or even triple what students learn in a year.
It was no surprise then that US Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona called on school districts to prioritize their federal pandemic relief funds for high dosage tutoring. Unfortunately, districts around the country have struggled to act on Secretary Cardona’s recommendation.
Scaling Challenge
Whether high dosage tutoring can be scaled in the aftermath of the pandemic is an open question. Many schools have struggled to deal with the logistics of re-opening, including declining enrollment, chronic absenteeism, and worsening mental health crises among young people. Exacerbating matters is the labor shortage felt by industries across the economy, including schools. Education agencies attempted to scale up tutoring in this environment more quickly and at a larger scale than had previously been attempted. A different scaling problem is that these agencies were adapting tutoring program parameters to try to fit their local context without any guidance about which program design features are essential (versus unnecessary) to promote student learning.
Years Active
2021 – present
Topics
Project Leads
Monica Bhatt
Senior Research Director
Trayvon Braxton
Portfolio Director
Terence Chau
Research Director
Ellen Dunn
Project Director
Jon Guryan
Faculty Co-Director
Jens Ludwig
Faculty Co-Director
Matteo Magnaricotte
Research Director
Fatemeh Momeni
Research Director
Michelle Ochoa
Portfolio Director
Greg Stoddard
Senior Research Director
John Wolf
Associate Director
The Solution
We need a crash R&D program to figure out how to scale tutoring to help as many children as possible. In collaboration with MDRC, the Education Lab launched the Personalized Learning Initiative to do just that. What is the best type of tutoring to help each student learn as much as possible at the lowest possible cost? To answer that question, we:
- Partner with school districts around the country to serve thousands of low-income children with different ‘flavors’ of tutoring that seek to solve the scale problem in different ways (virtual rather than in-person tutoring; strategic use of AI as a complement to tutors, etc.)
- Measure the impacts on student learning of these different flavors of tutoring for different students and different contexts
- Create a ‘blueprint’ for districts about how to most effectively scale tutoring
At least 30 minutes of intensive, individualized instruction three or more days per week is one of the most effective learning interventions studied to date.
Why We Need to Act Now
At the time of the pandemic, 50 million American children were of school age. The vast majority of them were negatively affected by the pandemic, losing half a year of schooling on average—even more for the most disadvantaged children.
That creates an enormous risk that an entire generation will miss key developmental milestones. The data show that children who can’t read by the end of 3rd grade are four times as likely to drop out of high school; children who haven’t passed algebra by the end of 9th grade are five times as likely to drop out. This is not just a schooling problem; given the well-documented relationship between education and almost every other major life outcome, failing to remediate pandemic learning loss will mean widening inequality in income, wealth, health, home ownership, criminal justice involvement, and retirement security, as well as depressed economic growth for the nation as a whole. Pandemic learning loss is the most important problem no one is talking about.
Learn More
Questions? Contact Education Lab Executive Director Sadie Stockdale Jefferson, PhD at ssjefferson@uchicago.edu for more information.
This work is supported by an $18 million donation from America Achieves, Citadel Founder and CEO Ken Griffin, and Arnold Ventures.
Partner Spotlight
Our MDRC partners published a blog post highlighting key takeaways from the implementation of a tutoring program in Fulton County, Georgia as a part of our Personalized Learning Initiative. The piece offers a deeper look at the strategies that make tutoring successful and how schools can effectively implement them.
High-dosage tutoring is providing our children the support they need to recover from the learning challenges of the pandemic and reach their full academic potential. We’re proud to be an anchor partner in this project so that we can reach students across Chicago and learn how we can best tailor our supports.
CEO of Chicago Public Schools
The Education Lab is one of our nation’s premier educational research organizations, and we are thrilled to have them spearheading this project. Their commitment to rigorous research and proven track record of partnership makes them an excellent choice to support school districts and policymakers seeking strategies that advance student outcomes.
CEO, Accelerate
We need to accelerate learning for the millions of students who have fallen behind during the pandemic. I care deeply about addressing this urgent recovery challenge and helping America’s students realize their true potential. I am thankful so many people are committed to this undertaking, which is important for the future of our country.
Founder and CEO, Citadel
Latest Updates
What America can learn from ‘Toyota Way’ to improve education outcomes
Jens Ludwig and Randall Stephenson present a transformative idea to improve learning outcomes in the U.S.
National Study Finds In-School High Dosage Tutoring Is Successfully Accelerating Student Learning, Reversing Pandemic-Era Learning Loss
Initial findings from the Personalized Learning Initiative show that in-school high dosage tutoring meaningfully increased math learning for students in Chicago Public Schools and Fulton County Schools.
How In-School Tutoring Benefits Both Attendance and Math Scores
Education Week’s Olina Banerji talks with Education Lab Senior Research Director Monica Bhatt about preliminary results from the Personalized Learning Initiative, which found that in-school tutoring is leading to positive effects on math scores.
How to Build It and Ensure They Will Come: Educators’ Advice on High-Dosage Tutoring Programs
Read a new brief from our partners at MDRC that highlights educators’ advice on implementing high-dosage tutoring programs.
Realizing the Promise of High Dosage Tutoring at Scale: Preliminary Evidence for the Field
This technical report outlines preliminary results from the Personalized Learning Initiative showing that high dosage tutoring can be scaled and can work–even when delivered in the aftermath of the pandemic and in diverse academic settings.
Personalized Learning Initiative Research Brief
Overview of the Personalized Learning Initiative, a nationwide R&D initiative to scale the benefits of tutoring.
Overcoming Pandemic-Induced Learning Loss
The Education Lab’s faculty co-directors, Dr. Jens Ludwig, professor at the University of Chicago, and Dr. Jon Guryan, professor at Northwestern University, published a paper commissioned by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group for its 2023 policy volume.