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Due, in part, to the strong evidence of the effectiveness of tutoring on learning acceleration (Nickow et al., 2020), many school districts and states now offer free access to on-demand tutoring programs (Goldstein, 2021; Robinson et al., 2022) in order to mitigate and reverse the widening opportunity gaps in the US education system. However, simple logic and recent studies suggest that less-engaged students are less likely to take advantage of these opt-in learning resources, thereby leading to the expansion of educational disparities rather than their reduction (Robinson et al., 2022). This randomized controlled trial tests the impact of communicating with teachers on students’ take up of on-demand virtual tutoring services. In the treatment group, students’ teachers receive a series of four emails prompting them to promote and integrate on-demand tutoring in and out of the classroom. Each of these four emails stresses that their school is providing all students with free, on-demand, one-on-one virtual tutoring services. Each email also provides teachers with information on the platform, how students can log-on, and suggestions on how to integrate on-demand tutoring into their students’ education.

Equalizing access to high-impact tutoring has the potential to mitigate and reverse the widening opportunity gaps in the US education system. Research consistently demonstrates that tutoring interventions have substantial positive effects on student learning—often translating to an additional 3-15 months of school (Nickow et al., 2020).This randomized controlled trial seeks to explore the effects of synchronous, small-group virtual tutoring in Kindergarten through 2nd grade early literacy on student academic performance and school attendance. Students assigned to tutoring will meet with a tutor virtually during the school day as part of a regularly scheduled intervention block. The tutoring provider requested that 1,816 students be identified by participating schools as qualifying for reading tutoring based on their beginning of year DIBELS assessments. The tutoring provider set enrollment quotas for each grade and subject. Stratifying by school and grade, we randomly assigned eligible students to a control group or to receive tutoring. Students assigned to tutoring were then randomly assigned to receive 1:1 or 2:1 tutoring.

Districts across the United States are increasingly adopting tutoring as a strategy to support their struggling students, the majority of whom come from low-income families and marginalized backgrounds. Our study will explore whether providing tutors with a professional community of practice (CoP) enhances their own experiences as tutors, as well as the experiences of the students they serve. We will randomly assign tutors to receive access to an online CoP, where they can find curated resources, reflect on their experiences, and crowdsource questions and best practices. We hypothesize that providing tutors with a digital platform to connect asynchronously and organically will improve tutors’ sense of social support, increase their self-efficacy, and ultimately increase their likelihood of pursuing a career as an educator and their ability to improve student learning.

Past data examining the effectiveness of FEV tutor has found that students who have higher average participation points per tutoring session show more growth on standardized tests (both ELA and math) than students with lower average participation points per session. The consistency of this finding suggests that there may be a causal impact of student participation on the efficacy of tutoring. The following experiment is designed to test the impact of more explicit participation feedback from the tutor on student achievement in math.

Research consistently demonstrates that tutoring interventions have substantial positive effects on student learning—often translating to an additional 3-15 months of school, with the largest effects for programs using highly educated and trained tutors (Nickow et al., 2020). Instructional coaching has shown promise for improving instructional practice and student outcomes (Kraft et al., 2018). This randomized controlled trial seeks to explore the effects of providing tutors with personalized instructional coaching.