New research: Done right, virtual tutoring nearly rivals in-person version

Two new Johns Hopkins University studies explore how high-quality virtual tutoring can help struggling students.


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Ignite Reading ProgrambThis story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.

High-dosage, in-person tutoring gets results, recent research suggests. But as federal funding for remediation dries up and schools struggle to raise students’ post-COVID skills, educators have been hoping for a lifeline in the form of live, online tutoring.

While virtual tutors still work directly with students in real time, they can work from anywhere, expanding the potential talent pool and lowering costs.

Until recently, virtual tutoring had scant evidence that it works very well, with few rigorous studies of its effectiveness. But new findings, including two recent studies from Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Research and Reform in Education, are beginning to offer a different narrative: Done well and with the same safeguards as traditional in-person tutoring, the virtual version can be nearly as good.

“I was always one of those people who was so skeptical — ‘it’s never going to work,’” said Amanda Neitzel, an assistant professor at Hopkins and the research center’s deputy director. “And then I did these studies, and I was shocked, because it did work.”

In a study published in December, Neitzel and her colleagues found that first-graders in Massachusetts who used Ignite Reading, a one-to-one virtual tutoring program, made substantial progress in reading, with the percentage of students reading on grade level rising from just 16% in the fall to about 50% by spring.

The share of “struggling” readers also dropped, from 64% in the fall to 28% by the spring.

The study tracked about 1,900 students in 13 high-poverty Massachusetts school districts in the 2023-24 school year. The students showed nearly five-and-a-half months’ more progress on a key reading test than those who didn’t get the tutoring. And they improved across the board, with English learners, students with disabilities and low-income students all gaining ground.

Ignite tutors work with students for 15 minutes every day, typically during “literacy blocks” in class or in separate, staff-monitored rooms.

In a separate study published in September, Neitzel and her colleagues found that students who got online Air Reading tutoring outperformed their peers by about two points on NWEA reading assessments, a “significant” change that would raise the average student slightly to the 55th percentile in the class, or just above average.

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