Do Teachers Support High-Impact Tutoring? A Survey Experiment

• In Event: Emerging Evidence on Implementing High-Impact Tutoring at Scale

Abstract

Objective
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, tutoring has become a popular tool for learning recovery. By the end of the 2021-22 school year, 23 states initiated legislation mandating or encouraging tutoring initiatives, and federal pandemic relief funds were made available for school districts to spend directly on tutoring programs. This is all for good reason: over 100 randomized controlled trials show that high-impact tutoring is one of the most effective ways to accelerate student learning (Dietrichson et al., 2017; Nickow et al., 2020; Fryer, 2017).

For tutoring to be a sustainable and effective strategy, however, teachers need to be bought-in and support the practice (White et al., 2022). Despite the influx of policymakers and educational leaders pushing for schools to adopt the intervention, we know little about teachers’ perceptions of tutoring because research has focused extensively on the benefits of tutoring for students. Teachers may also experience benefits of their own when their students receive personalized tutoring. On the other hand, teachers may not be supportive of tutoring programs due to competing priorities and a fear that tutoring may deplete school resources.
We address the following questions:
How supportive are teachers of personalized tutoring for students?
What do teachers believe are the primary benefits of tutoring?
What drives teachers’ support for tutoring?
Methods & Data
We conducted a survey that randomly assigned conditions to examine teachers’ perceptions of tutoring on two aspects: the population receiving tutoring and whom we identify as the recipient of tutoring. We implemented the survey in a large, urban school district on the West Coast at the end of the 2020-2021 school year. A total of 1,683 teachers responded to the survey, for a response rate of 62% across all teachers in the district. We linked the survey data to administrative data on teachers, including their demographics and experience, as well as the school where they taught.

Analysis & Preliminary Results
We found that teachers generally support tutoring and consistently ranked it as one of their top choices for addressing student learning loss. Teachers were more likely to prioritize tutoring when they considered the benefits for students, as opposed to themselves. However, even when asked to consider how tutoring might help them personally, teachers tend to focus on the advantages for their students. Additionally, teachers view tutoring as most beneficial when it targets academically struggling students, although those who acknowledge the non-academic benefits of tutoring (e.g., academic benefits, social-emotional learning benefits, etc.) see more potential for tutoring to help all students.
Significance
Our findings have implications for how district leaders design and introduce tutoring initiatives to teachers. First, leaders who want to implement a tutoring program may want to use teachers as allies. Second, sharing how a tutoring program will positively impact students may be the most effective way to promote buy-in among teachers. We find that teachers’ support for tutoring appears to be driven by the learning gains academically struggling students may be able to make if they are paired with a tutor.

Author

• Monica G. Lee, Stanford University
  Presenting Author