Matthew Kraft: The Dynamics of Scaling High-Dosage Tutoring within the K-12 Public Education System: A Multi-Year Analysis

The College of Education Studies welcomes Matthew Kraft, Associate Professor of Education Studies and Economics at Brown University who will present his talk “The Dynamics of Scaling High-Dosage Tutoring within the K-12 Public Education System: A Multi-Year Analysis.”

A large body of evidence documents the efficacy of smaller-scale tutoring programs, often delivered under favorable circumstances with volunteer participants. Motivated by this evidence, school systems across the globe have invested in high-dosage tutoring as a promising approach to support students’ academic recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We study a large urban district’s efforts to scale tutoring and integrate it into the U.S. public school system across three years. Survey data and participant interviews suggest student and tutor satisfaction with the program rose substantially over time even as the program scaled to serve over 3,000 students. We evaluate the effects of the program using a combination of field experiments and quasi-experimental methods. Despite successfully delivering high dosages of tutoring, we find only small average effects on students’ achievement in reading and no effects in math. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that tutoring was most effective for students with lower levels of baseline achievement. Efforts to provide personalized learning to all students via a multi-tiered system of support and online adaptive learning platforms may have reduced the treatment-control contrast in this context.