When Amanda Neitzel first evaluated a
live virtual reading-tutoring program
called AirReading two years ago, she
found what most educators would
have predicted: modest results. One
semester of live video tutoring nudged
struggling early readers forward by
roughly a month’s worth of learning.
But when she ran the study across a
full school year, the difference was
extraordinary. Literacy gains more
than doubled.
“This tutoring should be in school
budgets, just like textbooks,” says Neitzel,
an associate research professor at
the Johns Hopkins Center for Research
and Reform in Education (CRRE) and
its deputy director of evidence
research. Virtual tutoring in reading,
she argues, has moved beyond being a
temporary pandemic triage. “We were
doing badly before the pandemic,” she
says. “Far too many kids are not
reading proficiently at grade level. So
now in my presentations, I sort of lead
with, ‘We’re this many years past the
pandemic and literacy scores haven’t
recovered. Let’s take a step back and
fix the y-axis on this.'”
“This tutoring should be in school budgets, just like textbooks.”
Amanda Neitzel
Associate research professor, Johns Hopkins Center for Research
and Reform in Education
Neitzel’s latest paper, co-authored
with CRRE colleagues Nathan Storey
and Xue Wang, reports the results of a
randomized controlled trial of
AirReading for K–8 students across two districts: a rural, predominantly
Hispanic school in Texas and a larger,
diverse suburban district in Louisiana.
Students in grades one through four
who had been flagged for reading
intervention were randomly assigned
either to receive AirReading during the
school day or to continue with their
usual literacy instruction. AirReading’s
tutors—all holding bachelor’s
degrees, prior K–3 classroom experience,
and state certification—worked
with small groups of up to four
students in 30-minute virtual sessions
four days a week.
The results were clear. Students
assigned to AirReading gained the
equivalent of 2.8 additional months of
learning over their peers in the control
group, which the study correlates to
roughly an 11-percentile-point jump.
According to Neitzel, the results match
those typically seen with well-implemented
in-person tutoring. The finding
is particularly striking because the
impact of virtual tutoring had almost
no evidence base before the pandemic.
What virtual tutoring cannot do,
however, is produce those gains in less
time. The study found students who
attended at least 56 sessions made
larger gains than those who attended
fewer. “Sustained exposure is likely
necessary,” Neitzel and her co-authors
wrote, “particularly in early grades
where skill development is cumulative
and foundational.”
Longer sessions do not necessarily
mean better results, either. “It’s not
perfectly linear,” Neitzel says. “A lot
depends on the age of the kids. A first
grader is not going to sit through a
45-minute tutoring session. A lot of
times people don’t think a 20-minute
session is long enough to do anything,
but with that age group—if it’s really
focused and a solid 15 minutes—it is.”
These findings come at a time
when federal pandemic-relief funds
have expired, prompting many school
districts with tighter budgets to
compress tutoring into shorter
windows. “In the beginning, it was
like: We’re back from the pandemic
and we’re just going to do this highimpact
tutoring. All the kids will be
caught up in three years, and then
we’re not going to need to keep
spending this money,” Neitzel says. But
she has concluded that this premise
never worked and still doesn’t.
While education interventions
often benefit students who are already
doing well, AirReading’s benefits were
broadly distributed. The study found
that English learners, students
receiving special education services,
economically disadvantaged students,
and students across racial and ethnic
groups gained at the same rate.
One question AirReading’s study
couldn’t answer: Are learning gains
retained after tutoring ends? A
separate CRRE evaluation that Neitzel
led offers an encouraging sign. In a
follow-up to the center’s earlier study
of Ignite Reading, a virtual tutoring
program serving first graders, 85% of
students who finished the program at
a benchmark proficiency were still at
benchmark a year later. Neitzel
qualifies that this follow-up study was
observational, not a controlled trial,
but the results are promising.
States are beginning to bet on the
model. Last year, Louisiana won a
five-year, $15 million federal grant to
expand AirReading to roughly 4,500
first and second graders, with CRRE
evaluating the rollout across rural and
urban school districts. Massachusetts
is funding high-dosage literacy
tutoring at 272 elementary schools
through its state budget and added a
$10 million federal grant this year.
Neitzel, who taught first grade
before becoming a researcher and
whose work focuses on closing opportunity gaps, believes the shift could be
transformative for low-income students
in the bottom quartile. “It was
always hard as a teacher when there
were kids you just couldn’t help,” she
says. “Because they just needed more
than [what] you teaching 21 first
graders at once could do.”
