How Tutoring Could Benefit Students Who Do Not Need It

If you’ve been following my blogs, or if you know research on tutoring, you know that tutoring is hugely beneficial to the students who receive it. Recent research in both reading and math is finding important impacts of forms of tutoring that are much less expensive and scalable than the one-to-one tutoring by certified teachers that was once dominant. A review of research my colleagues and I did on effective programs for struggling readers found a mean effect size of +0.29 for one-to-small group tutoring provided by teaching assistants, across six studies of five programs involving grades K-5 (Inns, Lake, Pellegrini, & Slavin, 2018). Looking across the whole tutoring literature, in math as well as reading, positive outcomes of less expensive forms of tutoring are reliable and robust.

My focus today, however, is not on children who receive tutoring. It’s on all the other children. How does tutoring for the one third to one half of students in typical Title I schools who struggle in reading or math benefit the remaining students who were doing fine?

Imagine that Title I elementary schools had an average of three teaching assistants providing one-to-four tutoring in 7 daily sessions. This would enable them to serve 84 students each day, or perhaps 252 over the course of the year. Here is how this could benefit all children.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action

Eliminating within-class ability grouping.

Teachers justifiably complain about the difficulty of teaching highly diverse classes. Historically, they have dealt with diversity, especially in reading, by assigning students to top, middle, and low ability groups, so that they can provide appropriate levels of instruction for each group. Managing multiple ability groups is very difficult, because two-thirds of the class has to do seatwork (paper or digital) during follow-up time, while the teacher is working with another reading group. The seatwork cannot be challenging, because if it were, students would be asking questions, and the whole purpose of this seatwork is to keep students quiet so the teacher can teach a reading group. As a result, kids do what they do when they are bored and the teacher is occupied. It’s not pretty.

Sufficient high-quality one-to-four reading tutoring could add an effect size of at least +0.29 to the reading performance of every student in the low reading group. The goal would be to move the entire low group to virtual equality with the middle group. So some low achievers might need more and some less tutoring, and a few might need one-to-one tutoring rather than one-to-four. If the low and middle reading groups could be made similar in reading performance, teachers could dispense with within-class grouping entirely, and teach the whole class as one “reading group.” Eliminating seatwork, this would give every reading class three times as much valuable instructional time. This would be likely to benefit learning for students in the (former) middle and high groups directly (due to more high quality teaching), as well as taking a lot of stress off of the teacher, making the classroom more efficient and pleasant for all.

Improving behavior.

Ask any teacher who are the students who are most likely to act out in his or her class. It’s the low achievers. How could it be otherwise? Low achievers take daily blows to their self-esteem, and need to assert themselves in areas other than academics. One such “Plan B” for low achievers is misbehavior. If all students were succeeding in reading and math, improvements in behavior seem very likely. This would benefit all. I remember that my own very well-behaved daughter frequently came home from school very upset because other students misbehaved and got in trouble for it. Improved behavior due to greater success for low achievers would be beneficial to struggling readers themselves, but also to their classmates.

Improved outcomes in other subjects.

Most struggling students have problems in reading and math, and these are the only subjects in which tutoring is ever provided. Yet students who struggle in reading or math are likely to also have trouble in science, social studies, and other subjects, and these problems are likely to disrupt teaching and learning in those subjects as well. If all could succeed in reading and math, this would surely have an impact on other subjects, for non-struggling as well as struggling students.

Contributing to the teacher pipeline.

In the plan I’ve discussed previously, teaching assistants providing tutoring would mostly be ones with Bachelor’s degrees but not teaching certificates. These tutors would provide an ideal source of candidates for accelerated certification programs. Tutors who have apparent potential could be invited to enroll in such programs. The teachers developed in this way would be a benefit to all schools and all students in the district.  This aspect would be of particular value in inner city or rural areas that rely on teachers who grew up nearby and have roots in the area, as these districts usually have trouble attracting and maintaining outsiders.

Reducing special education and retention.

A likely outcome of successful tutoring would be to reduce retentions and special education placements. This would be of great benefit to the students not retained or not sent to special education, but also to the school as a whole, which would save a great deal of money.

Ultimately, I think every teacher, every student, and every parent would love to see every low reading group improve in performance enough to eliminate the need for reading groups. The process to get to this happy state of affairs is straightforward and likely to succeed wherever it is tried. Wouldn’t a whole school and a whole school system full of success be a great thing for all students, not just the low achievers?

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.