Does Tutoring Work?
Emily, a lawyer from Texas, can’t remember exactly where she first heard about Mathnasium, a math-focused tutoring center located near her home in the suburbs of Austin—probably through volunteering at school or at a backyard party in her close-knit neighborhood. But parents in her friend group lauded its benefits often when talking, sometimes under their breath, about their kids’ math troubles. These accolades prompted Emily to view her own son Lyle’s math struggles a little differently. (Emily asked that we use first names only, for the sake of privacy.)
Emily noticed at the end of 1st grade that Lyle hadn’t learned simple math facts such as 2 + 3 = 5, and he frequently got confused on addition and subtraction operations. Math homework, which she often helped with in the evenings, caused him stress, and by the end of 2nd grade this past spring, Lyle was already worrying about how hard multiplication would be in 3rd grade.
“I get the sense they’re not pushing memorization” of math facts at his local public school, Emily said. Yet parents she spoke with who sent kids to Mathnasium two or three times a week were seeing big improvements in their students’ benchmarks and state test performance—some had improved so much they were being invited into the honors math class.
“If I feel like my efforts at self-tutoring at home aren’t getting him where he needs to be, I’d consider using Mathnasium as a support, so it could match where he is on reading and everything else,” she said. “There’s only so much that I know. Why not leave it to the experts?”
Parents may often try tutoring because they hear success stories from other parents—a “whisper network” among families that alerts parents to the potential of tutoring. Alexander Wiseman, a professor of educational leadership policy at Texas Tech University, said his research shows that in many communities around the world—not just affluent ones—it’s common for families to form networks that provide a “shadow education” system of tutoring outside the regular school system. Experts hypothesize that more families are seeking tutoring because of the understood cultural value of education, Wiseman said. Parents assume when kids aren’t doing well in school, getting them access to more learning opportunities is the answer.
In a study of global PISA data, Wiseman found that students are more likely to participate in private tutoring when the perception of school quality drops. Wealthier parents and less-affluent families both seek out private tutoring, his data show, but they may go about it in different ways.
“Often it’s low-income families that are attending schools where it’s more overtly lower quality, because it’s a low tax-base community and they don’t have the same resources, so families will incur the fees of private tutoring,” Wiseman said. “Or often they don’t go through commercial programs as much as they will just do personal tutoring or have family members tutor.”
Yet research shows that the biggest growth in tutoring—at least in walk-in tutoring centers—is happening in wealthy neighborhoods like Brentwood, Tennessee, and the suburbs of Austin, Texas, areas with well-financed public schools that are perceived to be of high quality. The aforementioned study by Kim and colleagues, forthcoming in the journal Education Finance and Policy and titled “Kumon In: The Recent, Rapid Rise of Private Tutoring Centers,” found that more than half of centers like Kumon and Mathnasiusm were located in school districts in the top 20 percent of income distribution.
“It is the families in the richest districts that are pursuing the most tutoring,” said co-author Joshua Goodman, an associate professor at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. “But in this paper, we have no information about the reasons why families are using these centers.”
Goodman hypothesized, though, that families may feel pressured about academic success related to getting their child into a good college. They also may calculate that sending their kids to free public school means they can afford to support them with tutoring if needed. Such interventions are generally much less expensive than sending a child to private school.
Families may also flock to tutoring because, like Emily, they hear about other students’ success. Research supports this anecdotal information—tutoring often helps, under the right conditions. Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom asserted in the 1980s that one-on-one tutoring could lift students’ achievement two standard deviations higher than what they would attain in a general classroom setting. More recent analysis paints a more nuanced, yet still quite positive picture of what tutoring can do. Recent gold-standard studies suggest that both small-group instruction and individual tutoring generate positive impacts in both reading and math. For instance, a study by Jonathan Guryan and colleagues showed that Saga Education’s in-school math tutoring intervention for low-income 9th and 10th graders in Chicago increased math test scores as well as students’ grades in math and non-math courses. In a more recent randomized controlled trial, students receiving high-dosage math tutoring gained half a year of learning compared to a control group receiving remedial instruction.
A recent meta-analysis of 100 controlled trials of tutoring programs, including the Saga study, showed that “high-quality tutoring”—individual or small-group instruction provided by a trained teacher three times weekly for 30 minutes to an hour—improved student achievement, especially in foundational skills in the early grades of elementary school. The tutoring programs examined in the study were nonprofit programs embedded into the public school day.
“We were really blown away by the consistency of effectiveness of tutoring programs,” said Vincent Quan, co-executive director of J-PAL North America and co-author of the study. “We’re not saying tutoring is a silver bullet, but it’s the rare intervention effective at improving learning outcomes for kids. The effect sizes are quite substantial, and remarkably consistent in terms of ability to improve outcomes, including kids who are several grade levels behind.”
In another look at what makes tutoring effective, an Ed Research for Action report found that tutoring had the biggest effects for students in early literacy and middle- and high-school math, and when students had a consistent relationship with a teacher.
“Often you have one teacher trying to teach 30 students at the same time, but [with tutoring] you have a caring educator meeting consistently with one student or a small group,” said Stanford researcher Carly Robinson, who co-authored the report. “So when a student gets stuck on something, a person that has a relationship with this student touches upon the instruction that student needs at that moment. It’s huge.”
