Grantee: OnYourMark
Study Type: RCT
Principal Investigator: Susanna Loeb – Stanford University, National Student Support Accelerator
Project Description: This is a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of OnYourMark Education, which provides high-impact virtual tutoring for 20 minutes a day, four days a week, to students in kindergarten through second grade. Tutors virtually work with students via video chat during the school day, regularly monitoring progress towards reading proficiency.
The study evaluated the impact of OnYourMark high-dosage tutoring on language and literacy skills for students in kindergarten through second grade. About 1,000 students were randomly assigned to receive tutoring from OnYourMark, with half that group receiving one-on-one tutoring and the other half receiving two-on-one tutoring. The remaining students were randomly assigned to the control group, and continued to receive instruction as usual. Control students did not receive any OnYourMark tutoring. Students completed two assessments of early literacy skills before and after tutoring—the DIBELS which captures foundational literacy skills and NWEA MAP Reading Fluency which also measures reading fluency and comprehension. The researchers fit a series of regression models, adjusting for demographic characteristics and the combination of school x grade (clustering at the pair level to account for students nested within tutor groups) to estimate differences in the outcomes between the group randomly assigned to receive tutoring and the control group. The researchers also estimated the separate impacts of receiving one-on-one tutoring and two-on-one tutoring and explored heterogeneity in impacts across grade, baseline reading performance, and sub-domains of literacy skills as measured with the DIBELS.
Key Findings: There were small main effects of receiving any high-dosage OnYourMark tutoring on children’s literacy skills as measured with the composite score on the DIBELS. The magnitude of the overall impact was 0.08 standard deviations. Effects of one-on-one tutoring were slightly larger—about 0.12 standard deviations. There were no impacts of high-dosage tutoring on the NWEA MAP Reading Fluency assessment across any of the tests. And there were no impacts of the two-on-one tutoring model on any of the measured outcomes. Examination of effects within grades and DIBELS subtests revealed that the largest effects were on letter sounds in kindergarten and decoding and word fluency in first grade. Impacts on DIBELS were also larger for students who scored at or below the 50th percentile on the pretest DIBELS assessment.
Study Citation: Loeb, S., Novicoff, S., Pollard, C., Robinson, C., & White, S. (2023). The effects of virtual tutoring on young readers: Results from a randomized controlled trial. National Student Support Accelerator Report.
Full report here.
The Key Findings above were reproduced from the published report and do not necessarily reflect interpretation of Overdeck Family Foundation staff.
