Exclusive: New Research Strengthens Case for Virtual Tutoring

When schools flocked to tutoring in response to pandemic learning loss, experts initially said they preferred in-person sessions.

But new studies bolster the evidence that done well, virtual models can be just as effective at moving students forward as face-to-face instruction.

In Massachusetts, first graders who spent 15 minutes a day online with a tutor from Ignite Reading stayed on track a year later without additional tutoring, according to data shared exclusively with The 74. Students gained, on average, at least five additional months of learning over their expected growth. 

Another virtual program, Hoot Reading, produced positive results in the Kansas City, Missouri, schools. Students who received one-on-one tutoring from certified teachers made greater progress than those who didn’t receive the extra help, new data shows. 

“Virtual models are getting stronger,” said Amanda Neitzel, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of the Ignite Reading study. “If you go back just a few years, we had no examples of evidence-proven models and now we are getting them.”

In addition to following Ignite Reading for two years, she recently published a study showing that elementary school students in Texas and Louisiana who received virtual tutoring from Air Reading, outperformed their peers and gained nearly three additional months of learning.

Results like those have broadened the conversation about how to bring students who are missing critical reading skills up to speed. 

“Tutoring can work in many ways and in different settings,” Kevin Huffman, CEO of Accelerate, said earlier this month at the nonprofit’s annual conference. 

When the organization began funding tutoring research four years ago, there were doubts, he said, about whether virtual programs could compete with in-person models. There’s more confidence in online versions now, but as with tutoring in general, progress depends on whether providers feature the components of a high-dosage program — meaning they were offered for roughly 90 minutes a week, during the school day with a trained tutor. Ensuring kids get all the tutoring hours a program is designed to deliver is also key.

“We obsess over student attendance,” said Jessica Reid Sliwerski, Ignite Reading’s founder. Now in 24 states, the program focuses on building phonics skills and reading fluency.

In the Johns Hopkins Ignite Reading study, which focused on 13 Massachusetts school districts, 85% of students who mastered foundational reading skills “during the crucial first grade window” were still keeping up at the end of second grade, Neitzel wrote. But if students didn’t meet expectations on time, they couldn’t catch up. Some were just too far behind.

“Many kids start our program still not knowing basic kindergarten skills, like letter names and sounds,” Sliwerski said. That means tutors have two years of content to get through.

To Sliwerski, the findings demonstrate that third grade, when many states decide whether students are strong enough readers to advance, is too late to intervene. If kids struggle to decode unfamiliar words, they won’t be able to comprehend more complex reading assignments. 

“We are so caught up in ‘reading by grade three’ that we aren’t honoring that kids are actually supposed to have fully cracked the code and be able to fluently read grade-level text at the end of first grade,” she said. “We act like kids have all the time in the world, when they don’t.” 

The 5,700-student Chelsea Public Schools was among the Massachusetts districts using Ignite Reading as part of a project funded by One8, a nonprofit that helped schools get high-dosage tutoring off the ground. The state now funds the program.  

At first, “our teachers were a little skeptical,” said Superintendent Almi Abeyta, a former kindergarten and first grade teacher. “They were like, ‘We just got off of remote learning. Why are we going to put kids on a computer again?’ ” 

Then they saw the data. Students made similar gains on DIBELS, a widely used early literacy assessment, whether they were Black, Hispanic, English learners or had a disability.

‘A great opportunity’

Results like those are why the Fallbrook Union Elementary School District, near San Diego, California, is now spreading the program to all of its elementary schools as part of its First Grade Promise initiative. 

In a pilot, Fallbrook STEM Academy, which serves a high-poverty population, enrolled 20 second graders in the program. Many of the students speak Spanish at home, didn’t attend preschool and lack access to books, flash cards and other early reading materials, said Principal Ana Arias. She called each parent to ask that they get their children to school a little early so they could meet with a tutor.

“I phrased it as an opportunity — a great opportunity — but I needed their commitment,” Arias said. “We have so many kids in the classroom and there’s so much need. It’s very rare to have a teacher meet one-on-one with a student every single day.” 

At the beginning of this school year, the 20 students were reading at a kindergarten level. By November, 19 had advanced to a first grade level, and she’s hoping they’ll be on par with their peers by the end of the school year. 

‘Transcend time zones’ 

The latest findings build on those that Harvard University and City University of New York researchers published last year. Whether tutoring is remote or in-person, they wrote, matters less than whether the tutor is well qualified and students attend sessions regularly.

Virtual models even have some advantages over in-person programs, experts say. Schools have to pay an in-person tutor whether or not the student is present. But virtual programs “transcend time zones,” Sliwerski said, and can redeploy a tutor to meet with another student.  

If the tutor is absent, “we have a substitute ready to go,” she said. “The technology underpinning the program ensures the child receives the exact lesson they were supposed to get.”

In Kansas City, consistency was key to the strong results. Students in first through fourth grade across 14 schools met with their tutors for 30-minute sessions at least three times a week for 20 weeks during the 2024-25 school year. The more sessions completed, the stronger the growth. Some students gained more than two months of additional learning and were less likely to be placed in special education. 

On average, the students who participated in the Hoot program and those in the comparison group began the school year two grade levels behind. While many are still struggling readers, their progress was significant, said Carly Robinson, a senior researcher at Stanford University and a co-author of the study.

“This wasn’t a boutique pilot,” she said. “It’s tutoring operating inside a district system that is messy, and it still proved to be effective.”

The district had to contend with technical glitches and unexpected snow days that forced students to miss some sessions.

Not all virtual programs have been able to overcome disruptions. 

In a large suburban district in Texas, some students meeting with virtual tutors during the 2021-22 school year did worse in reading than their peers who didn’t receive the intervention. Scheduling conflicts, like school assemblies, and tutor turnover, contributed to the disappointing results.

‘A higher bar’

Those challenges grow even more complex in the middle grades with electives and block schedules where students don’t have the same classes every day. But Rahul Kalita, co-founder of Tutored by Teachers, said maintaining relationships between tutors and students is essential. 

He hopes to contribute to the research base on virtual tutoring by participating in a randomized controlled study, funded by Accelerate and focused on math in two large Indianapolis middle schools. 

“It felt like the right opportunity to test our model under a higher bar of rigor,” he said.

On top of virtual programs refining their practices, districts, he said, “have also become more sophisticated buyers of tutoring.” Multiple districts across the country pay providers higher rates if students make measurable progress or pass state tests. 

In addition, there’s growing agreement that literacy tutoring, whether virtual or not, is more effective if it’s part of a strong early reading program that includes a curriculum based on the science of reading and screening students for dyslexia or other learning difficulties. 

“You can’t throw tutoring at the problem,” Sliwerski said at the Accelerate conference. “It has to be part of a very intentional system.”