5 Studies That Informed Our Thinking in 2024

We take evidence seriously at Overdeck Family Foundation. Our grantmaking focuses explicitly on helping to scale evidence-based approaches, whether we’re seeking to strengthen early childhood settings, out-of-school time STEM experiences, teacher quality, or student achievement in education systems across the country. At the same time, we are focused on using new research to help inform the field at large and shape our investment strategies.

As our team reflects on the past year, we’re highlighting five studies from 2024 that significantly impacted our vision for the future and influenced our thinking. Although each of these studies focus on distinct topics relevant to our core investment portfolios, they also share commonalities: a rigorous methodological approach, relatively large-scale sample sizes, and clear implications for policy and practice.

Taken together, these studies have succeeded in producing evidence that not only informs the education and philanthropic sectors, but also serves decision-makers who are shaping children’s learning experiences each and every day.

1. Tutoring and dosage go hand in hand

Since 2017, our Innovative Schools portfolio has invested over $15 million to help scale innovative tutoring programs. These investments are rooted in rigorous, experimental evidence finding that high-impact tutoring—in which students spend substantial time each week receiving targeted curriculum-aligned instruction while building strong relationships with tutors—has demonstrated sizeable, positive impacts on academic achievement ranging from about 0.20 to 0.29 standard deviations. Most of these studies, however, have focused on a handful of schools and tested a particular provider’s approach, and typically have directly examined the impacts of tutoring when implemented by and in an entire school district.

Recent work by researchers Matt Kraft, Danielle Sanderson Edwards, and Marisa Cannata looked at tutoring implemented from spring 2021 to spring 2023 in Metro Nashville Public Schools to estimate the impacts of the program delivered by the district at-scale. The study found that, when put into practice, the tutoring in Nashville was delivered less frequently than in a high-impact model, with the average student attending about 21 total sessions. By 2022-23, more than half of the tutoring took place before or after school, also likely lowering participation. This lower dosage (and deviation from a high-impact model) likely translated into smaller impacts than expected; researchers detected effects of about 0.04 to 0.09 standard deviations on reading achievement and found no impact on math achievement, though that may reflect the fact that less than a third of the tutoring focused on math.

As we plan for the future, this study and other work like it informs our thinking about the supports and inputs needed to successfully implement high-impact tutoring for thousands of children across a full district or state. It helps the field focus not only on what type of tutoring works, but on the specific conditions that must be in place for tutoring to deliver on its transformative potential.

2. High-quality instructional materials are important but not enough

Over the past two decades, it’s become clear that curricula matter for student learning. A number of large experimental studies have found positive impacts of high-quality instructional materials (HQIM)—materials that are rigorous, research-based, and aligned with grade-level standards—on student achievement. Yet, data from EdReports indicates that only 35 percent of ELA teachers and 51 percent of math teachers report using at least one of these curricula weekly. And, only one state—Rhode Island—has required Local Education Agencies to adopt state-approved HQIM in math and ELA.

Strengthening the adoption and implementation of HQIM has long been a priority for the Foundation and an area in which we’ve invested since 2016. Yet despite years of research into their effectiveness, HQIM have failed to reach all students. RAND researchers Sy Doan and Anna Shapiro’s latest findings from the 2023 American Instructional Resources Survey shine a light on a potential reason why. The survey showed that a significant number of teachers—about three in 10—believe district-recommended curricula are too challenging for the majority of their students, with teachers in high-poverty districts and those with less experience significantly more likely to adopt that viewpoint. Curricula adoption appeared particularly difficult in math; math teachers who reported that curricula were too challenging were less likely to use them during typical instruction.

Despite these less-than-encouraging findings, the report did find one bright spot—teachers who received effective professional learning were less likely to agree that curricula were too challenging. This finding provides continued evidence for the importance of investing in high-quality curriculum-based professional learning, which pairs supports like coaching with rigorous curricula. As we move into 2025, our Exceptional Educators portfolio is particularly focused on helping scale curriculum-based professional learning to more teachers, and investing in technology to ensure educators receive real-time, actionable, and specific feedback that can strengthen instruction and improve student outcomes.

3. GenAI holds promise for delivering impactful coaching at-scale

Since the introduction of genAI in 2022, Overdeck Family Foundation has sought to understand how this technology can improve education and make evidence-based tools and practices more effective, scalable, and affordable. We have been closely following the evidence to inform our investments and were excited to see a number of studies released in the last year that sought to uncover the potential impact genAI tools can have on the educator sector.

One of the most promising use cases we’ve identified for genAI is teacher coaching, directly aligned with our goal to scale high-quality professional learning. Some burgeoning experimental evidence has found that these types of coaching tools can improve target teacher practices. And in 2024, Yasemin Copur-Gencturk, Jingxian Li, and Sebnem Atabas released the most compelling evidence to date that genAI coaching can improve student achievement. In this study, the research team randomly assigned 1,727 middle school teachers to a business-as-usual control group or to an experimental group that received support from a virtual, interactive program that used intelligent tutoring systems to provide educators with just‐in‐time feedback. Follow-up data from a student assessment on ratios and proportional relationships—the substantive focus of the coaching—showed that the tool had a moderate-sized positive impact of 0.18 standard deviations on middle schoolers’ math achievement.

Although there is much more research to do in this area, this study provided helpful proof of concept evidence on what could be possible for genAI-enabled teacher coaching tools. We continue to be interested in helping organizations leverage genAI to innovate, improve, and scale professional learning, and are dedicated to investing in rigorous research to understand the impact of these new approaches on educational practice and student outcomes.

4. The effects of chronic absenteeism go beyond absent students

Chronic absenteeism—defined as students missing 10 percent or more school days during the academic year—is a significant and stagnant problem facing American schools post-pandemic. During SY 2022-23, 28 percent of students in 11 states missed enough school to be designated chronically absent. To respond to this widespread crisis, our foundation has made significant investments to improve family communications related to absenteeism, conduct research identifying drivers of and solutions to absenteeism, and support efforts that connect directly with states and districts to address the problem. To date, our work has focused heavily on how to get absent students back into the classroom to support their learning and development.

A recent study by Michael Gottfriend, Arya Ansari, and S. Colby Woods is helping us expand our thinking to include the impact of absenteeism on teachers. In this study, researchers used nationally representative data on 2,370 kindergarten teachers collected pre-pandemic and examined the association between the overall percentage of classroom absences and teachers’ work satisfaction. The study used a method that allowed researchers to compare teachers within the same school, controlling for overall school-level conditions likely predictive of work satisfaction. The researchers found that higher classroom absenteeism was a significant predictor of lower teacher-reported work satisfaction, despite not affecting teachers’ day-to-day instructional practices, biases, assessment of school culture and supports, or perceptions of school challenges.

As teachers nationally continue to report lower satisfaction in their work and less engagement in the profession, these findings underscore the importance of delivering on current initiatives to promote regular student attendance. We’ll continue to focus on investments that tackle absenteeism directly, but also aim to enhance students’ learning experiences and engagement in school to help promote increased attendance.

5. The importance of helping all students access informal STEM opportunities

Students in the U.S. spend approximately 20 percent of their time in a formal school setting, which means the majority of their learning occurs outside the classroom, while they engage in activities like play, socialization, and leisure. Helping all children experience high-quality enrichment out of school, including providing easier access to engaging and joyful STEM programs, may be an effective way to strengthen kids’ broader interest and engagement in STEM activities and careers. But, questions remain about the types of programs and approaches that are most effective.

A new meta-analysis published by Xin Xia, Lilian Bentley, Xitao Fan, and Robert Tai is starting to fill these gaps. The study aimed to quantify the benefit of access to informal STEM opportunities, like afterschool and summer programs, on students’ attitudes toward and interest in STEM. The researchers identified 19 rigorous studies that all used an experimental or quasi-experimental approach to examine the impact of informal STEM learning on student outcomes. In total, 6,160 student participants were reflected in the data. The researchers found an association of 0.21 standard deviations—considered moderate to large—between participation in informal STEM activities and students’ interest in and attitudes toward STEM. There was additional evidence demonstrating fairly consistent benefits of afterschool programs, summer camps, weekend school camps, field trips and virtual museums, mobile lab experiences, and outreach programs conducted by external organizations in partnership with schools. Additionally, programs focused on middle and high school students had larger effects than those on elementary school students.

This evidence underscores the important role out-of-school programs play in the STEM ecosystem, and highlights the shared attributes of programs that are most impactful. It also stresses the need for continued research funding to strengthen and expand the evidence base on informal STEM, including helping to identify which approaches work best for which students under which implementation conditions. We are excited to use this research to inform the strategies and investments of our Inspired Minds portfolio, which focuses on improving access to high-quality and engaging STEM learning opportunities.

As we reflect on the research that informed our thinking over the past year, we remain committed to using evidence to make investments in high-impact programs and solutions, as well as funding rigorous research ourselves. In 2024, we supported nine external impact studies of organizations funded by our portfolios, as well as 10 separate field-building studies. The latter examined opportunities to make tutoring more impactful and cost-efficient at scale, the impact of AI-enabled teacher coaching, approaches to reduce absenteeism, and strategies to strengthen the quality of the out-of-school-time STEM workforce.

We are committed to continuing this work in 2025 and hope you join us in supporting evidence-building activities that can help states and districts make informed decisions about resources and best practices for improving teaching and learning. If you’re interested in co-funding a research study, please reach out to research@overdeck.org, and explore the findings from our latest research grants in our Research Repository.

Header image courtesy of Challenger Center