There are few topics in college access and higher education that inspire as much conviction from opposing sides as standardized tests.

Over the last few years, many people have come to believe that such tests are at the root of education inequity.

Opponents of tests have argued that removing tests from college admissions is the primary way to expand access.

Those beliefs, combined with the banal reality that few people like the tests — whether it’s the students studying for them, the parents paying for test prep or institutions being called out for using them in admissions — have made tests a perfect target.

But tests are not the single source of inequity, their elimination is not the cure and likability is not the criterion upon which the future of American education should rest. While I did not like taking a Covid test or the unmistakably pink line it summoned right before my planned vacation, the test was a meaningful predictor of what was to come, as well as where I had been.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Test-optional policies didn’t do much to diversify college student populations

Today, because many colleges and universities across the country no longer require students to include SAT or ACT scores in their applications, there’s a perception among some students that including test scores adds no additional value.

And yet, in the class of 2023, 1.9 million students took the SAT at least once, while 1.4 million took the ACT. Millions of students still take the SAT and ACT and choose to include their scores as one more way to stand out in admissions.

However, fewer students from lower-income backgrounds are taking these tests than in years past. The College Board reported that in 2022 only 22 percent of test-takers were from families earning less than $67,084 annually — a steep decline from 43 percent six years earlier. In contrast, from 2016 to 2022, the percentage of test-takers from wealthy households grew slightly or stayed about the same.

A clear pattern has emerged in which two groups — one wealthy and one not — have responded to test-optional policies in disparate ways. The middle and upper class opt in, and the others opt out. Publicly available information from various colleges compiled by Compass Education Group shows that students who submit scores have a higher rate of acceptance than those who don’t.

If these tests supposedly no longer matter, why are privileged students using them as a competitive advantage — while underrepresented students opt out?

We now have evidence that standardized tests in fact may help — not hurt — students from low-income families and underrepresented minority groups get into and persist in college. The latest research shows that not only are test scores as predictive or even more predictive than high school grades of college performance, they are also strong predictors of post-college outcomes.

Therefore, earning and reporting high test scores should boost acceptance odds for students from under-resourced high schools and communities, since admissions officers seek data that indicates a student can keep up with the academic rigor at their institutions. Reporting higher scores can be the difference between attending a two- or a four-year college, where chances of persistence and graduation are exponentially higher.

Furthermore, for thousands of high-schoolers, these tests are not optional — and this has nothing to do with the admission policies of colleges and universities.

Many states and school districts in the U.S. use the SAT and ACT tests as part of their high school graduation requirements, accountability and evaluation systems.

These states and systems rely on the tests because they are a standardized way to tell whether students across a variety of districts — rich, poor; big, small; urban, rural — are ready for postsecondary success.

Many educators believe that standardized tests flatten such variables by placing everyone on the same scale — that they are, in fact, more equitable than the alternatives.

Yes, there are score gaps by race and class. However, standardized tests did not cause these realities — the unfairness associated with them is symptomatic of the broader inequalities that permeate education and all aspects of our society.

Related: OPINION: The charade of ‘test-optional’ admissions

The SAT and ACT measure a student’s mastery of fundamentals, including the English and math skills they should be learning in K-12. The unfairness lies in the fact that wealthier students often attend better schools and can afford to pay for extracurricular test preparation, which reinforces their schoolwork and often comes with valuable counseling. In doing so, they increase their confidence as well their motivation. All these things also help prepare students for life, not simply a test.

Rather than target our rage at tests that consistently deliver bad news, let’s focus our energies on preparing all students to do well on these tests so that they know that college is within their reach, and they are prepared to succeed when they get there.

We must embed test preparation in the school day for all students, not just a select few, all across America. We should work with teachers to ensure they are prepared to deliver high-quality instruction that reinforces what students learn in class and enables them to achieve scores that will unlock a myriad of opportunities.

There are models for this. Advanced Placement classes, for example, prepare students for tests that specifically help them become more competitive in admissions and earn college credit, allowing them to save time and money in college. (Unsurprisingly and unfortunately, this advantage, too, is often unavailable in many under-resourced schools and districts.) We can and should create a similar but more equitable model for college entrance exams.

As we begin 2024, let’s adopt a fresh and nuanced perspective on standardized tests so that all students can use them to their advantage — to be prepared for and succeed on the tests and, ultimately, in college and beyond.

Yoon S. Choi is CEO of CollegeSpring, a national nonprofit that provides in-school test preparation to districts in high-poverty neighborhoods, working with and through teachers to ensure they can deliver high-quality instruction that prepares students for standardized tests.

This story about standardized tests was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Our students are struggling. As a college president and a clinical psychologist, I know this well.

Recent headlines tell a distressing story about the mental health of college students. While the news articles are alarming, it is worth noting that much of the data they cite comes from self-reporting by students.

This self-reporting gives us important insights into how our students are feeling, but it is not equivalent to clinical diagnoses. By equating self-reporting with diagnoses, we risk applying the wrong interventions.

I’ve spent much of my career overseeing clinical services and other student supports, and I know the importance of clinical interventions. They are intended to be matched to specific diagnoses and can involve a variety of treatments, including individual or group and outpatient or inpatient, by licensed mental health professionals.

But I believe we must shift how we support students’ emotional needs. Clinical interventions are not the only way — and often not the most appropriate or effective way — to support young people who may be temporarily struggling with feelings that do not meet the full psychological definition of mental illness.

Rather than needing a clinical intervention, many students may benefit most from support that builds their resilience if they are feeling sad, worried, overwhelmed or anxious. Resilient students are better positioned to cope with temporary periods of heightened emotional stress.

In the past, teaching these skills was usually not seen as central to the mission of a college or university, yet learning how to cope emotionally may be among our students’ most vital and integral lessons.

It is something that will serve them throughout — and well beyond — their time on our campuses.

Related: Congress is starting to tackle student mental health

Data drawn from student self-reporting provides important insights into their needs. Some 44 percent of students reported that they experienced symptoms of depression during the 2021-22 academic year, a Healthy Minds survey of 96,000 U.S. college students shows; 37 percent said they experienced anxiety.

In addition, two out of five undergraduates said that they “frequently” experience emotional stress, results from a Gallup-Lumina Foundation report found, while 36 percent of students pursuing bachelor’s degrees reported that they had considered “stopping out” in the last six months. The most commonly cited reasons were “emotional stress” (69 percent) and “personal mental health reasons” (59 percent).

Researchers have hypothesized that at least some of these self-reported crises may be due to an increased awareness and normalization of mental health conditions.

This awareness is something we should regard as positive and beneficial because it reduces the stigma and isolation that have long impeded students from getting support. But we also must recognize an unintentional, negative impact of this increased awareness: overinterpretation.

Young people experiencing negative emotions and facing normal developmental challenges may be particularly vulnerable to misidentifying those experiences as actual illnesses.

This is not to suggest that the mental health crisis is not real, or that we should not support our students or validate their experiences. Students are struggling every day on my campus and on campuses across the country. Mental illness often first appears or worsens in young adulthood, and for these students, accessing appropriate clinical intervention is critical.

But for many students, what will be most appropriate and effective are supports to develop their resilience and coping strategies and the confidence to rebound from setbacks.

Being a young adult today is not easy. In addition to facing typical challenges, such as forming an identity and developing life skills, they have grown up with pressures from social media, isolation brought on by the global pandemic and the economic and political uncertainties of the twenty-first century.

Rising college costs have also raised the stakes for many students. College is a huge commitment both monetarily and emotionally, and our students know it.

They inevitably face obstacles when they move into the college environment, such as not knowing where they fit in and encountering more challenging coursework than they had previously. Believing they are an outlier, rather than the norm, may undermine their resilience.

That’s why at Lewis & Clark we incorporate resilience-building practices, using research-based belonging exercises as well as intentional peer-to-peer support.

Two of our psychology professors, Jerusha Detweiler-Bedell and Brian Detweiler-Bedell, spearheaded our participation in a multiyear Stanford-led study that aimed to foster a deeper sense of belonging among our incoming first-year students, with the goal of helping them understand that their struggles are normal — and that things will get better over time.

The exercises in the study incorporated stories of obstacles faced by other students and how they overcame them. While the original study’s sample size was small, we saw an increase in retention rates and GPAs, especially among students from underrepresented groups. The results were so compelling that all incoming Lewis & Clark undergraduates now participate in the social belonging intervention.

Related: OPINION: One college president uses board games, bedtime stories, horses and ice-cream sundaes to help students cope

We also initiated a peer mentoring program specifically serving first-year students. The mentors reach out to incoming first-year students and introduce them to campus life with information about academic advising, navigating health and wellness services and various campus clubs and social options. The mentoring relationship begins during orientation and continues throughout the semester. Just as important as what the peer mentors do is how they model resilience.

Of course, approaches like these should be offered with an understanding of what other interventions some students may need. Clinical depression and anxiety disorders do require clinical support. Higher education institutions must continue to expand our capacity to provide such support for those students who need it.

But we must also prioritize programs that bolster resilience. These efforts can reassure and help students (and their families) who may be misidentifying their feelings based on popular rather than clinical understandings of depression and anxiety.

When it comes to setting students up for success in their professional and personal lives, resilience may be the most important skill we can encourage them to develop.

Robin H. Holmes-Sullivan is president of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She has maintained a private clinical psychology and consulting practice for more than three decades.

This story about college students and resilience was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Educators have long debated the best way to teach, especially the subjects of science and math. One side favors direct instruction, where teachers tell students what they need to know or students read it from textbooks. Some call it explicit or traditional instruction. The other side favors inquiry, where students conduct experiments and figure out the answers themselves like a scientist would. It’s also known as exploration, discovery learning or simply “scientific practices.”

The debate reignited among university professors during the pandemic with the 2021 online publication of a commentary in the journal Educational Psychology Review. Combatively titled “There is an Evidence Crisis in Science Educational Policy,” four experts in science education argued that the evidence for inquiry instruction is weak and that proponents of inquiry “exclude” or “mark as irrelevant” high-quality studies, particularly controlled trials, that “overwhelmingly show minimal support” for inquiry learning.  

One of the authors is the prominent Australian psychologist John Sweller, who formulated cognitive load theory, the widely accepted idea that our working memory can process only so much information at once. Other academics took notice. Traditionalists applauded it.

Sweller and his co-authors’ complaints date back to an influential 1996 report of the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academies of Sciences that shapes science education policy. The report encouraged science teachers to adopt an inquiry-based approach, and it was followed by similar calls from other policymakers. But the authors of the 2021 article said the council’s references for this policy change were “theoretical ideas packaged in conceptual articles rather than empirical evidence.”

The critics say that much of the positive evidence for inquiry comes from classroom studies where there are no control or comparison groups, making it impossible to know if inquiry is really better than alternatives. And they say that this research frequently lumps together inquiry instruction with other teaching practices and interventions, making it hard to disentangle how much the use of inquiry is making a difference. 

Soon after, another group of prominent education researchers issued a rebuttal. In March 2023, 13 scholars led by a Dutch researcher, Ton de Jong, took on the debate in the academic journal Educational Research Review. Titled “Let’s talk evidence – The case for combining inquiry-based and direct instruction,” their article acknowledged that the research is complicated and doesn’t unequivocally point to the superiority of inquiry-based learning. Some studies show inquiry is better. Some studies show direct instruction is better. Many show that students learn the same amount either way.  (As they walked through a series of meta-analyses that summarized hundreds of studies, they pointedly noted that inquiry critics also ignored or mischaracterized some of the research.) 

Their bottom line: “Inquiry-based instruction produces better overall results for acquiring conceptual knowledge than does direct instruction.” 

How could two groups of scholars look at the same body of research and come to opposite conclusions?

The first thing to notice is that the two groups of scholars are arguing about two different things. The inquiry critics pointed out that inquiry wasn’t great at helping students learn content and skills. The inquiry defenders emphasize that inquiry is better at helping students develop conceptual understandings. Different teaching methods may be better for different learning goals.

The second takeaway is that even this group of 13 inquiry defenders argue that teachers should use both approaches, inquiry and direct instruction. That’s because students also need to learn content and procedural skills, which are best taught through direct instruction, and in part because it would be boring to learn only one way all the time. 

Indeed, even the critics of inquiry instruction noted that inquiry lessons and exercises may be better at sparking a love of science. Students often say they enjoy science more or become more interested in the field after an inquiry lesson. Changing students’ attitudes about science is certainly not a compelling reason to teach this way all the time, as students need to learn content too, but even traditionalists admit there’s something to be gained from fun exploration. 

My third observation is that the inquiry defenders listed a bunch of caveats about when inquiry learning has proven to be most effective. Unstructured inquiry lessons where students groped in the dark weren’t successful in building any kind of understanding.

Caveat 1: Students need a strong foundation of knowledge and skills in order for inquiry learning to be successful. In other words, students need some facts and the ability to calculate things in different ways to take advantage of inquiry learning and arrive at deeper conceptual understandings. Complete mastery isn’t a prerequisite, but some familiarity is. The authors suggested, for example, that it can be beneficial to start with some direct instruction before launching into an inquiry lesson. 

Caveat 2: Inquiry learning is far more effective when students receive a lot of guidance and feedback from their teacher during an inquiry lesson. Sometimes the most appropriate guidance is a clear explanation, the authors said, which is the same as direct instruction. (My brain started to hurt, thinking about how direct instruction could be woven into inquiry-based learning. Is it really inquiry learning if you’re also telling students what they need to do or know? At some point, shouldn’t we be labeling it direct instruction with hands-on activities?) 

The 13 authors admitted that each student needs different amounts and types of guidance during an inquiry lesson. Low-achieving students appear to benefit more from guidance than middle- or high-achieving students. But low-achieving students also need more of it. And that can be tough, if not impossible for a single teacher to manage. I began to wonder if effective inquiry teaching is humanly possible.

Not only can inquiry include a lot of direct instruction, but sometimes direct instruction can resemble an inquiry classroom. While many people may imagine that direct instruction means that students are passively absorbing information through lectures or books, the inquiry defenders explained that students can and should be engaged in activities even when a teacher is practicing direct instruction. Students still solve problems, practice new things independently, build projects and conduct experiments. The core difference can be a subtle one and hinge upon whether the teacher explains the theory to the students first or shows examples before students try it themselves (direct), or if the teacher asks students to figure out the theories and the procedures themselves, but gives them explicit guidance along the way (inquiry).

Like all long-standing academic debates, this one is far from resolved. Some educators prefer inquiry; some prefer direct instruction.  Depending upon your biases, you’re likely to see a complicated, mixed body of research as glass half full or glass half empty.

In December 2023, Sweller and the inquiry critics wrote a response to the rebuttal in the same Educational Research Review journal.  Beyond the academic sniping and nitpicking, the two sides seem to have found some common ground.

“Our view… is that explicit instruction is essential for novices” but that as students gain knowledge, there should be “an increasing emphasis on independent problem-solving practice,” Sweller and his camp wrote.  “To the extent that De Jong et al. (2023) agree that explicit instruction can be important, we appear to have reached some level of agreement.”

The real test will be watching to see whether that consensus makes it to the classroom.

This story about teaching strategies was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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Silence may be golden, but when it comes to learning with a tutor, talking is pure gold. It’s audible proof that a student is paying attention and not drifting off, research suggests. More importantly, the more a student articulates his or her reasoning, the easier it is for a tutor to correct misunderstandings or praise a breakthrough. Those are the moments when learning happens.

One India-based tutoring company, Cuemath, trains its tutors to encourage students to talk more. Its tutors are in India, but many of its clients are American families with elementary school children. The tutoring takes place at home via online video, like a Zoom meeting with a whiteboard, where both tutor and student can work on math problems together. 

The company wanted to see if it could boost student participation so it collaborated with researchers at Stanford University to develop a “talk meter,” sort of a Fitbit for the voice, for its tutoring site. Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, the researchers could separate the audio of the tutors from that of the students and calculate the ratio of tutor-to-student speech.

In initial pilot tests, the talk meter was posted on the tutor’s video screen for the entire one-hour tutoring session, but tutors found that too distracting. The study was revised so that the meter pops up every 20 minutes or three times during the session. When the student is talking less than 25 percent of the time, the meter goes red, indicating that improvement is needed. When the student is talking more than half the time, the meter turns green. In between, it’s yellow. 

More than 700 tutors and 1,200 of their students were randomly assigned to one of three groups: one where the tutors were shown the talk meter, another where both tutors and students were shown the talk meter, and a third “control” group which wasn’t shown the talk meter at all for comparison.

When just the tutors saw the talk meter, they tended to curtail their explanations and talk much less. But despite their efforts to prod their tutees to talk more, students increased their talking only by 7 percent. 

When students were also shown the talk meter, the dynamic changed. Students increased their talking by 18 percent. Introverts especially started speaking up, according to interviews with the tutors. 

The results show how teaching and learning is a two-way street. It’s not just about coaching teachers to be better at their craft. We also need to coach students to be better learners. 

“It’s not all the teacher’s responsibility to change student behavior,” said Dorottya Demszky, an assistant professor in education data science at Stanford University and lead author of the study. “I think it’s genuinely, super transformative to think of the student as part of it as well.”

The study hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal and is currently a draft paper, “Does Feedback on Talk Time Increase Student Engagement? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial on a Math Tutoring Platform,” so it may still be revised. It is slated to be presented at the March 2024 annual conference of the Society of Learning Analytics in Kyoto, Japan. 

In analyzing the sound files, Demszky noticed that students tended to work on their practice problems with the tutor more silently in both the control and tutor-only talk meter groups. But students started to verbalize their steps aloud once they saw the talk meter. Students were filling more of the silences.

In interviews with the researchers, students said the meter made the tutoring session feel like a game.  One student said, “It’s like a competition. So if you talk more, it’s like, I think you’re better at it.” Another noted:  “When I see that it’s red, I get a little bit sad and then I keep on talking, then I see it yellow, and then I keep on talking more. Then I see it green and then I’m super happy.” 

Some students found the meter distracting.  “It can get annoying because sometimes when I’m trying to look at a question, it just appears, and then sometimes I can’t get rid of it,” one said.

Tutors had mixed reactions, too. For many, the talk meter was a helpful reminder not to be long-winded in their explanations and to ask more probing, open-ended questions. Some tutors said they felt pressured to reach a 50-50 ratio and that they were unnaturally holding back from speaking. One tutor pointed out that it’s not always desirable for a student to talk so much. When you’re introducing a new concept or the student is really lost and struggling, it may be better for the teacher to speak more. 

Surprisingly, kids didn’t just fill the air with silly talk to move the gauge. Demszky’s team analyzed the transcripts in a subset of the tutoring sessions and found that students were genuinely talking about their math work and expressing their reasoning. The use of math terms increased by 42 percent.

Unfortunately, there are several drawbacks to the study design. We don’t know if students’ math achievement improved from the talk meter. The problem was that students of different ages were learning different things in different grades and different countries and there was no single, standardized test to give them all. 

Another confounding factor is that students who saw the talk meter were also given extra information sessions and worksheets about the benefits of talking more. So we can’t tell from this experiment if the talk meter made the difference or if the information on the value of talking aloud would have been enough to get them to talk more.

Demszky is working on developing a talk meter app that can be used in traditional classrooms to encourage more student participation. She hopes teachers will share talk meter results with their students. “I think you could involve the students a little more: ‘It seems like some of you weren’t participating. Or it seems like my questions were very closed ended? How can we work on this together?’”

But she said she’s treading carefully because she is aware that there can be unintended consequences with measurement apps. She wants to give feedback not only on how much students are talking but also on the quality of what they are talking about. And natural language processing still has trouble with English in foreign accents and background noise. Beyond the technological hurdles, there are psychological ones too.

 “Not everyone wants a Fitbit or a tool that gives them metrics and feedback,” Demszky acknowledges.

This story about student participation was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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Research points to intensive daily tutoring as one of the most effective ways to help academically struggling children catch up. There have been a hundred randomized control trials, but one of the most cited is of a tutoring program in Chicago high schools, where ninth and 10th graders learned an extra year or two of math from a daily dose of tutoring. That’s the kind of result that could offset pandemic learning losses, which have remained devastating and stubborn nearly four years after Covid first erupted, and it’s why the Biden Administration  has recommended that schools use their $190 billion in federal recovery funds on tutoring.

This tutoring evidence, however, was generated before the pandemic, and I was curious about what post-pandemic research says about how tutoring is going now that almost 40 percent of U.S. public schools say they’re offering high-dosage tutoring and more than one out of 10 students (11 percent) are receiving it this 2023-24 school year. Here are four lessons. 

1. Why timing matters

Scheduling tutoring time during normal school hours and finding classroom space to conduct it are huge challenges for school leaders. The schedule is already packed with other classes and there aren’t enough empty classrooms. The easiest option is to tack tutoring on to the end of the school day as an after-school program.

New Mexico did just that and offered high school students free 45-minute online video sessions three times a week in the evenings and weekends. The tutors were from Saga Education, the same tutoring organization that had produced spectacular results in Chicago. Only about 500 students signed up out of more than 34,000 who were eligible, according to a June 2023 report from MDRC, an outside research organization. Researchers concluded that after-school tutoring wasn’t a “viable solution for making a sizable and lasting impact.” The state has since switched to scheduling tutoring during the school day.

Attendance is spotty too. Many after-school tutoring programs around the country report that even students who sign up don’t attend regularly.

2. A hiring dilemma 

The job of tutor is now the fastest-growing position in the K–12 sector, but 40 percent of schools say they’re struggling to hire tutors. That’s not surprising in a red-hot job market, where many companies say it’s tough to find employees. 

Researchers at MDRC in a December 2023 report wrote about different hiring strategies that schools around the country are using. I was flabbergasted to read that New Mexico was paying online tutors $50 an hour to tutor from their homes. Hourly rates of $20 to $30 are fairly common in my reporting. But at least the state was able to offer tutoring to students in remote, rural areas where it would otherwise be impossible to find qualified tutors.

Tutoring companies are a booming business. Schools are using them because they take away the burden of hiring, training and supervising tutors. However, Fulton County, Georgia, which includes Atlanta, found that a tutoring company’s curriculum might have nothing to do with what children are learning in their classrooms and that there’s too little communication between tutors and classroom teachers. Tutors were quitting at high rates and replaced with new ones; students weren’t able to form long-term relationships with their tutors, which researchers say is critical to the success of tutoring. 

When Fulton County schools hired tutors directly, they were more integrated into the school community. However, schools considered them to be “paraprofessionals” and felt there were more urgent duties than tutoring that they needed to do, from substitute teaching and covering lunch duty to assisting teachers. 

Chicago took the burden off schools and hired the tutors from the central office. But schools preferred tutors who were from the neighborhood because they could potentially become future teachers. The MDRC report described a sort of catch-22. Schools don’t have the capacity to hire and train tutors, but the tutors that are sent to them from outside vendors or a central office aren’t ideal either. 

Oakland, Calif., experienced many of the obstacles that schools are facing when trying to deliver tutoring at a large scale to thousands of students. The district attempted to give kindergarten through second grade students a half hour of reading tutoring a day. As described by a December 2023 case study of tutoring by researchers at the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), Oakland struggled with hiring, scheduling and real estate. It hired an outside tutoring organization to help, but it too had trouble recruiting tutors, who complained of low pay. Finding space was difficult. Some tutors had to work in the hallways with children. 

The good news is that students who worked with trained tutors made the same gains in reading as those who were given extra reading help by teachers. But the reading gains for students were inconsistent. Some students progressed less in reading than students typically do in a year without tutoring. Others gained almost an additional year’s worth of reading instruction – 88 percent more.

3. The effectiveness of video tutoring 

Bringing armies of tutors into school buildings is a logistical and security nightmare. Online tutoring solves that problem. Many vendors have been trying to mimic the model of successful high dosage tutoring by scheduling video conferencing sessions many times a week with the same well-trained tutor, who is using a good curriculum with step-by-step methods. But it remains a question whether students are as motivated to work as hard with video tutoring as they are in person. Everyone knows that 30 hours of Zoom instruction during school closures was a disaster. It’s unclear whether small, regular doses of video tutoring can be effective. 

In 2020 and 2021, there were two studies of online video tutoring. A randomized control trial in Italy produced good results, especially when the students received tutoring four times a week. The tutoring was less than half as potent when the sessions fell to twice a week, according to a paper published in September 2023. Another study in Chicago found zero results from video tutoring. But the tutors were unpaid volunteers and many students missed out on sessions. Both tutors and tutees often failed to show up.

The first randomized controlled trial of a virtual tutoring program for reading was conducted during the 2022-23 school year at a large charter school network in Texas. Kindergarten, first and second graders received 20 minutes of video tutoring four times a week, from September through May, with an early reading tutoring organization called OnYourMark. Despite the logistical challenges of setting up little children on computers with headphones, the tutored children ended the year with higher DIBELS scores, a measure of reading proficiency for young children, than students who didn’t receive the tutoring. One-to-one video tutoring sometimes produced double the reading gains as video tutoring in pairs, demonstrating a difference between online and in-person tutoring, where larger groups of two and three students can be very effective too. That study was published in October 2023. 

Video tutoring hasn’t always been a success. A tutoring program by Intervene K-12, a tutoring company, received high marks from reviewers at Johns Hopkins University, but outside evaluators didn’t find benefits when it was tested on students in Texas. In an unpublished study, the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford University organization that is promoting and studying tutoring, found no difference in year-end state test scores between students who received the tutoring and those who received other small group support. Study results can depend greatly on whether the comparison control group is getting nothing or another extra-help alternative.

Matthew Kraft, a Brown University economist who studies tutoring, says there hasn’t been an ideal study that pits online video tutoring directly against in-person tutoring to measure the difference between the two. Existing studies, he said, show some “encouraging signs.” 

The most important thing for researchers to sort out is how many students a tutor can work with online at once. It’s unclear if groups of three or four, which can be effective in person, are as effective online. “The comments we’re getting from tutors are that it’s significantly different to tutor three students online than it is to tutor three students in person,” Kraft said.

In my observations of video tutoring, I have seen several students in groups of three angle their computers away from their faces. I’ve watched tutors call students’ names over and over again, trying to get their attention. To me, students appear far more focused and energetic in one-to-one video tutoring.

4. How humans and machines could take turns

A major downside to every kind of tutoring, both in-person and online, is its cost. The tutoring that worked so well in Chicago can run $4,000 per student. It’s expensive because students are getting over a hundred hours of tutoring and schools need to pay the tutors’ hourly wages. Several researchers are studying how to lower the costs of tutoring by combining human tutoring with online practice work. 

In one pre-pandemic study that was described in a March 2023 research brief by the University of Chicago’s Education Lab, students worked in groups of four with an in-person tutor. The tutors worked closely with two students at a time while the other two students worked on practice problems independently on ALEKS, a widely used computerized tutoring system developed by academic researchers and owned by McGraw-Hill. Each day the students switched:  the ALEKS kids worked with the tutor and the tutored kids turned to ALEKS. The tutor sat with all four students together, monitoring the ALEKS kids to make sure they were doing their math on the computer.

The math gains nearly matched what the researchers had found in a prior study of human tutoring alone, where tutors worked with only two students at a time and required twice as many tutors. The cost was $2,000 per student, much less than the usual $3,000-$4,000 per student price tag of the human tutoring program.

Researchers at the University of Chicago have been testing the same model with online video tutoring, instead of in-person, and said they are seeing “encouraging initial indications.” Currently, the research team is studying how many students one tutor can handle at a time, from four to as many as eight students, alternating between humans and ed tech, in order to find out if the sessions are still effective.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University conducted a similar study of swapping between human tutoring and practicing math on computers. Instead of ALEKS, this pilot study used Mathia, another computerized tutoring system developed by academic researchers and owned by Carnegie Learning. This was not a randomized control trial, but it did take place during the pandemic in 2020-21. Middle school students doubled the amount of math they learned compared to similar students who didn’t receive the tutoring, according to Ken Koedinger, a Carnegie Mellon professor who was part of the research team. 

“AI tutors work when students use them,” said Koedinger. “But if students aren’t using them, they obviously don’t work.” The human tutors are better at motivating the students to keep practicing, he said. The computer system gives each student personalized practice work, targeted to their needs, instant feedback and hints.

Technology can also guide the tutors. With one early reading program, called Chapter One, in-person tutors work with young elementary school children in the classroom. Chapter One’s website keeps track of every child’s progress. The tutor’s screen indicates which student to work with next and what skills that student needs to work on.  It also suggests phonics lessons and activities that the tutor can use during the session.  A two-year randomized control trial, published in December 2023, found that the tutored children – many of whom received short five-minute bursts of tutoring at a time – outperformed children who didn’t receive the tutoring. 

The next frontier in tutoring, of course, is generative AI, such as Chat GPT. Researchers are studying how students learn directly from Khan Academy’s Khanmigo, which gives step-by-step, personalized guidance, like a tutor, on how to solve problems. Other researchers are using this technology to help coach human tutors so that they can better respond to students’ misunderstandings and confusion. I’ll be looking out for these studies and will share the results with you.

This story about video tutoring was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post PROOF POINTS: Four lessons from post-pandemic tutoring research appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Many high school students struggle to figure out which of the nation’s 2,600 four-year colleges and universities should be on their lists of reach, target and safety schools. To help with that decision, schools across the country have paid many millions to private companies that display data on the fate of past students. But two recent studies have found that this information could discourage students who might have a shot at the most elite schools.

One of the most popular data displays in the college application process is a scattergram, which shows the grades and test scores of admitted and rejected students from a student’s own high school at each college. Scattergrams are a bit like looking at horse race results for each school except the names of former classmates aren’t displayed.

Academic researchers have been trying to find out how these scattergrams, which have been widely adopted by U.S. high schools over the past two decades, are influencing students. Two separate studies indicate that these information displays are discouraging some teens from applying to the most competitive schools, such as Harvard and Stanford. The researchers found that applications to these schools plummet after students see the scattergrams. At the same time, the researchers note that lower-achieving students tend to benefit from the scattergrams because the data encourages them to aim higher. 

The latest study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October 2023, tracked the college applications of 70,000 students at 220 public high schools over five application cycles, from 2014-15 to 2019-20. In the years immediately after a school purchased Naviance, the market leader in scattergrams, 17,000 high achieving students with test scores above 1310 on the SAT (out of 1600 points) or above 29 on the ACT (out of 36 points), were 50 percent less likely to apply to the most competitive universities and colleges. Consider 100 high-achieving students applying to college: 24 applied to the most competitive schools before the scattergrams, but only 16 of them did afterward.

Among high-achieving students, an unidentified college that had received the third-most applications dropped out of the top 10 after Naviance was introduced. High-achieving students became much more likely to apply to local colleges, which were relatively unpopular choices before Naviance.

Sabina Tomkins, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information and lead author of the study, doesn’t know exactly why students were deterred, but she said there are two likely explanations. One is that students are intimidated when they see that their scores are slightly below the average of previously admitted students. Some kids might want to avoid the risk of rejection altogether and play it safe, applying only to places where they’re more likely to be accepted. 

Another possibility is that the scattergrams have an unintended marketing or advertising effect. Students may feel more motivated to apply to the most popular schools where they see masses of green checks, showing that many previous peers have been admitted. Students can’t see the scattergrams for the least popular schools. To preserve student privacy, high schools commonly suppress scattergrams for schools to which fewer than five or 10 alumni have applied. Small or far-away elite schools can often fall into this suppressed category. “When the school doesn’t show up as a scattergram, it might not cross their mind in the same way it would have before,” said Tomkins. 

Tomkins only had application data and doesn’t know where students enrolled in college. But if students are applying to fewer elite schools, they’re likely getting into and matriculating at fewer of them too, Tomkins said.

An earlier study, published in 2021 in the Journal of Labor Economics, also found that Naviance’s scattergrams deterred students from applying to and enrolling in the most selective colleges. That study looked at only 8,000 students at one unidentified school district in the mid-Atlantic region. At the time that study was released, some critics questioned whether the unintended consequences of scattergrams were true nationwide. The larger 2023 study bolsters the evidence that more information isn’t always a good thing for all students.

Importantly, both studies also found that the scattergrams encouraged lower-achieving students. They were more likely to apply to four-year colleges after seeing that their grades and test scores were similar to those of previous students who had been accepted. Before their schools purchased Naviance, more of these students avoided four-year colleges and opted for two-year community colleges instead. A separate body of research has generally found that starting at a four-year college, while more expensive, increases the likelihood of earning a bachelor’s degree and higher wages after graduation. 

Whether we should care about students attending the most prestigious and elite colleges is a matter of debate. Authors of the 2023 study pointed me to Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s research, which has found that going to an Ivy League university or four other elite colleges, instead of a top flagship public college, increases the likelihood of becoming a CEO or a U.S. senator and substantially increases a graduate’s chances of earning in the top 1 percent. However, attending an Ivy instead of a top public flagship didn’t increase a graduate’s income on average. 

The scattergram studies looked only at high schools that had purchased Naviance’s product. The company was the first to market scattergrams to schools in 2002 and says its product reaches nine million of the nation’s 15 million high school students. According to GovSpend, which tracks government contracts, public high schools have spent well over $100 million on Naviance, which, in addition to scattergrams, also allows high school counselors to manage their students’ college applications and send transcripts to colleges. Competitors include Scoir, Ciaflo and MaiaLearning, which all offer similar scattergrams. 

PowerSchool, the company that owns Naviance, points out that analyzing small slices of its customer base, as the academic researchers have, can be misleading. According to the data PowerSchool shared with me, 38 percent of the six million college applications that flow through its platform each year were sent to “reach” schools, schools where it would be challenging for a student to gain acceptance based on their grades and test scores. A spokesperson said that applications to reach schools have been increasing annually, proof that its product “does not discourage students from applying to their reach or target schools.” 

The company also highlighted the benefits for lower-achieving students, asserting that the scattergrams “increase equity.”  Indeed, the earlier 2021 study found that Black, Hispanic and low-income students were especially more likely to apply to and enroll in four-year colleges after using Naviance.

I talked with a half dozen college counselors who work with high school students and they said they generally didn’t see high-achieving students getting discouraged after seeing scattergrams. “If anything, I see the opposite,” said Scott White, an independent college counselor in New Jersey and a former high school guidance counselor for over 30 years. “Students are over-applying, not under-applying. They throw in dream applications. If you look at the Naviance scattergrams, they are not in profile. ‘I know I’m not gonna get in there, but I’m gonna apply there anyway.’  That is incredibly common.” 

Amy Thompson, a college counselor at York High School outside of Chicago, told me that the scattergrams are a “big hit” with high school students and get students engaged in the college process because clicking on the data can be fun and even addicting. 

Only one counselor told me he had seen a case where a student was discouraged after seeing scattergrams, but he said it was an unusual experience. That doesn’t mean the researchers’ data analysis is wrong. It’s common for data to point out things that we’re not aware of or that we cannot readily see. 

The biggest drawback to scattergrams, according to veteran college counselors, is that the information is incomplete and can give students the false sense that admissions decisions at elite schools are primarily based on grades and test scores. The scattergrams don’t show whether a student was an athlete, a musician or from a wealthy family with many generations of alumni. Students might see a green check with a low test score and not appreciate that the student had other factors weighing in his or her favor. 

Counselors told me the scattergrams are most useful and accurate for large state schools, where there is a lot of data and the academic range of past admittees helps students identify safety and target schools. The more competitive the college, and the more the college looks at factors other than grades and test scores, the less useful the scattergrams. 

And just like the stock market, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Schools fall in and out of favor. What was a safety school one year can unexpectedly rise in selectivity. A school that was once hard to get into can lower its standards in an effort to fill seats.

I don’t know that I care so much about kids not applying to enough Ivy League schools. But it’s fascinating how the information age changes our behavior for better and for worse, and how kids are influenced by spending hours and hours clicking on websites and absorbing masses of data.

This story about scattergrams was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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The recent rise of ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence tools has inspired growing anxiety on college campuses while fueling a national conversation about faculty attempts to thwart students from using the tools to cheat.

But that prevalent narrative around AI and cheating is overshadowing the technology’s true potential: Artificial intelligence holds great promise for dramatically enhancing the reach and impact of postsecondary institutions and improving outcomes for all students.

Last month, President Biden issued a sweeping executive order aimed at better mitigating the risks and harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, while also arguing for the need to “shape AI’s potential to transform education by creating resources to support educators deploying AI-enabled educational tools.”

Biden’s call to action could not have been more timely.

The question now is not whether generative AI can positively transform educational access and attainment, but whether higher education is ready to truly democratize and personalize learning with these tools.

Related: Future of Learning: Teaching with AI, part 1

AI’s transformational potential is perhaps greatest at community colleges, minority-serving institutions and open-access universities. These schools’ diversity necessitates a broader set of supports. Dedicated faculty and staff not only serve a very broad range of students — including first-generation and low-income learners, returning adults, those for whom English is a second language and those balancing academic pursuits with family and work responsibilities — but they do so with fewer resources than instructors at elite and flagship institutions. Generative AI tools can augment critically needed services such as advisers, tutors and coaches.

Exploring the possibilities of AI is not cheap, however. While some low-cost or free tools can make a difference, the largest impacts will be achieved through more advanced — and costly — tools that are developed with specific learner populations in mind and blend academic material with students’ sociocultural and language contexts rather than providing generic solutions.

Challenges around cost and availability could further disenfranchise the very learners who could gain the most from AI tools by denying them access to the experts, resources and development opportunities they need to benefit from them. Institutions may struggle to bring the true power of AI to bear on addressing their students’ needs.

Similarly, too often, the datasets and algorithms behind AI tools reflect historical inaccuracies and intrinsic biases that only further disenfranchise learners. This will continue to be the case until we collectively confront the inequitable ways that AI systems are designed and resources are distributed.

That’s why we need to think about AI differently, shifting our focus from debates about academic integrity and concerns about cheating to how we can leverage artificial intelligence in equitable ways that will boost college completion for all students.

Related: How college educators are using AI in the classroom

Let’s focus on how AI advances could provide all learners with the kinds of high-touch support already offered to students who attend wealthier institutions. AI tools could have a transformative effect on access, progression and completion for learners who were previously constrained by limitations of time, space and resources.

Imagine if generative AI tutors could provide 24/7 individualized support, along with AI-powered virtual reality tools that would widen access to experiential learning opportunities. What about having adaptive learning tools enabling students to learn at a pace that best suits their level of preparation? And personalized learning materials that reflect their backgrounds and lived experiences?

A technology that has incredible potential to help expand access to the many benefits of higher education should not become a mechanism through which inequity is exacerbated.

Such steps could augment engagement and outreach efforts to lower the barriers that prevent students from underserved communities from earning degrees.

This is not a speculative vision of a not-too-distant future, but an emerging reality on some campuses. Arizona State University, for example, has assembled a team of engineers and data scientists to develop AI tools to enhance learning and improve student outcomes.

For now, such experimentation is limited to colleges and universities with the resources for scaling the benefits of the technology and developing the guardrails necessary for mitigating risks to learners.

Related: OPINION: The world is changing fast. Students need data science instruction ASAP

According to a new report from the Brookings Institution, many of the nation’s most selective and affluent colleges and universities are clustered in the same coastal metro areas long home to Big Tech — and now to AI innovation and job growth.

That’s unfortunate. Access to new technology — and the ability to play a role in shaping its design — should not be limited by geography or institutional type. A technology that has incredible potential to help expand access to the many benefits of higher education should not become a mechanism through which inequity is exacerbated.

That’s why the newly convened Complete College America Council on Equitable AI plans to bring together organizations representing over 1,000 access-focused two-year and four-year colleges and universities in January. We hope to influence and initiate policies and practices to encourage equitable engagement of AI technologies.

We hope that college leaders, policymakers and technologists will join us to make sure that AI helps to realize, rather than hinder, higher education’s promise as an engine of equity, prosperity and hope.

Yolanda Watson Spiva is president of Complete College America.

Vistasp M. Karbhari is a professor of engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he also served as president from 2013 to 2020, and is a fellow and board member of Complete College America.

This story about AI in higher education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Every December, I compile a list of the most popular Proof Points columns. In 2023, the big story was the failure of schools to help children catch up from pandemic learning losses. I was proud to write several watchdog stories about the online tutoring that schools are buying and the crazy job of an online tutor. I was surprised that those were not among the most popular stories. What struck a chord with readers was research about math, math and more math….and some handy study tips. 

Thank you to everyone who read and commented on my weekly stories about education data and research. I look forward to continuing this conversation with you next year. If you would like to receive my email newsletter and be notified when the column comes out each week, please click here and fill out the form. I’ll be back again on Jan. 2, 2024 with a story about college applications. Happy New Year!

1. PROOF POINTS: Inside the perplexing study that’s inspired colleges to drop remedial math

CUNY’s seven-year study of its experiment to get rid of remedial math has arguably been one of the most influential attempts to use experimental evidence to change how higher education operates and is now affecting the lives of millions of college students. However, many colleges may not realize that the study never looked at how to help students pass college algebra, an important prerequisite course. Some researchers argue that the shift to statistics instead of the elimination of remedial ed might have driven the results.

2. PROOF POINTS: How a debate over the science of math could reignite the math wars

This column explained the origins of the new “science of math” movement, and how a group of special education researchers are seeking to copy the science of reading playbook. Their first manifesto attacked what they described as common misconceptions about teaching math.

3. PROOF POINTS: Professors say high school math doesn’t prepare most students for their college majors

College professors often lament that their students are unprepared for the rigor of college-level math. But this Alabama survey highlighted another problem: high schools aren’t teaching the math skills that college professors in non-STEM fields want students to have. 

4. PROOF POINTS: Do math drills help children learn?

I took a look at  the contentious research debate on timed math tests. Short quizzes might be a more efficient way to memorize multiplication tables, but even advocates caution that there are many pitfalls. 

5. PROOF POINTS: New higher ed data by race and ethnicity

Five charts document that white, Black and Hispanic Americans are going to college at about the same rates. But starting does not mean finishing. The likelihood of making it through the coursework and tuition payments and ultimately earning a degree varies by race and ethnicity. 

6. PROOF POINTS: New research review questions the evidence for special education inclusion

People often assert that the research shows that students with disabilities learn better when they are included in regular classrooms. But a new meta-analysis says the research isn’t nearly as clear cut as advocates assert; some students with disabilities may be worse off and learn less in general education classes.

7. PROOF POINTS: A spate of recent studies on the “Google effect” adds to evidence that the internet is making us dumber

Here’s some news all of us can use. The stuff we’re Googling isn’t sticking in our memories and is quickly forgotten. One experiment finds that we’d retain more if we tried to guess before Googling.

8. PROOF POINTS: The best way to teach might depend on the subject

Researchers find that math students learn best through individual practice while English students thrive in groups.

9. PROOF POINTS: Flashcards prevail over repetition in memorizing multiplication tables

Here’s some concrete research advice for teachers on how to help their students memorize things. Since reading about this flashcard experiment, I’ve been telling my daughter to go straight to the cards and skip the studying. Kids may get frustrated not knowing something and looking at the answer over and over again. But she aced two vocab quizzes. (I was sad that multiplication songs weren’t the winner, but if you are nostalgic for Schoolhouse Rock and Billy Leach, I’ve included bonus links in this piece for you to sing along to.) 

10. PROOF POINTS: One expert on what students do wrong

The University of Virginia’s Daniel Willingham explains why reading our notes, using highlighters and making to-do lists are not the best ways to learn. Read the piece for the most effective methods.

This story about the top education research stories of 2023 was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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Numbers don’t lie, right? But they also don’t always tell the whole story. That’s the case with the most recent results from a key global education test, the Program for International Student Assessment or PISA. 

In the past, PISA results have often spurred anguished discussion about why U.S. students are so far behind other countries like Finland, Korea and Poland. But the most recent rankings, released in December 2023, indicated that U.S. 15-year olds moved up in the international rankings for all three subjects –  math, reading and science. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona credited the largest federal investment in education in history – roughly $200 billion – for keeping the United States “in the game” during the pandemic. (The tests were administered in 2022.)

But that rosy spin hides a much grimmer picture. Rankings may have risen, but test scores did not. The only reason the U.S. rose is because academic performance in once higher ranking countries, such as Iceland and the Slovak Republic, fell by even more since the previous testing round in 2018. Neither India nor China, which topped the rankings in 2018, participated in the 2022 PISA. In math, the U.S. rose from 29th place to 28th place, still in the bottom half of economically advanced nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international organization of 38 member countries that oversees the PISA exam.

The deterioration in math was particularly devastating. American students scored 13 points lower than in 2018, equivalent to losing two-thirds of a year of education in the subject. These were the lowest U.S. math scores recorded in the history of the PISA math test, which began in 2003. More than a third of U.S. 15-year-olds (mostly 10th graders) are considered to be low performers, unable to compare distances between two routes or convert prices into a different currency. Over the past decade, the share of U.S. students in this lowest level has swelled; back in 2012, a little over a quarter of U.S. students were considered to be low performers.

Only seven percent of American students can do math at advanced levels. The United States has more students in the bottom group and fewer students in the top group than most other industrialized countries that are part of the OECD. (Click here to see an international ranking of low and top performers in each country.)

The results also confirmed the widespread inequalities in U.S. education. Black and Hispanic students, on average, scored far below Asian and white students. Those from low-income backgrounds scored lower than their more affluent peers.

Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD, emphasized that the inequities in the U.S. are often misunderstood to be primarily problem of weak schools in poor neighborhoods. His analysis indicates that low math performance is common throughout U.S. schools. Some students are performing much worse than others within the same school, and that range between low and advanced students within U.S. schools is much greater than the range in scores between schools. 

This new PISA test is the first major international education indicator since the Covid pandemic closed schools and disrupted education. Test scores declined all around the world, but the OECD found there was only a small relationship between how long schools were closed and their students’ performance on the PISA test. School closures explained only 11 percent of the variation in countries’ test scores; nearly 90 percent is attributable to other, unclear reasons. However, the OECD looked at the absolute level of test scores and not how much test scores fell or rose. More analysis is needed to see if there’s a stronger link between school closures and test score changes. 

Even if school closures eventually prove to be a more important factor, the pandemic isn’t the only reason students are struggling. Global scores have generally been declining for the past two decades. One hypothesis is that technology is distracting teenagers. Students were asked about technology distraction for the first time on the 2022 PISA. Forty-five percent of students said they feel anxious if their phones are not near them. Sixty-five percent report being distracted by digital devices during math lessons. Up to an hour a day of computer time for leisure was associated with higher performance. But heavy users, those who spent five to seven hours on computers for fun, had lower academic performance, even after adjusting for family and school socioeconomic profiles. 

Another factor could be the rise in migration across the world. Perhaps declining test scores reflect the challenge of educating new immigrants. However, the OECD didn’t find a statistically significant correlation between immigration and academic performance on average. In the United States, immigrants outscored students with native-born parents in math after adjusting for socio-economic status. There was no difference between immigrants and non-immigrants in reading.

Japan was one of the few countries to defy the trends. Both its math and reading scores rose considerably between 2018 and 2022. Akihiko Takahashi, professor emeritus of mathematics and mathematics education at Chicago’s DePaul University, said schools were closed for a shorter period of time in Japan and that helped, but he also credits the collective spirit among Japanese teachers. In his conversations with Japanese teachers, Takahashi learned how teachers covered for each other during school closures to make sure no students in their schools fell behind. Some went house to house, correcting student homework.  

It’s tempting to look at the terrible PISA math scores and say they are evidence that the U.S. needs to change how it teaches math. But the PISA results don’t offer clear recommendations on which math approaches are most effective. Even Japan, one of the top performing nations, has a mixed approach. Takahashi says that students are taught with a more progressive approach in elementary school, often asking students to solve problems on their own without step-by-step instructions and to develop their own mathematical reasoning. But by high school, when this PISA exam is taken, direct, explicit instruction is more the norm.

The new results also highlighted the continued decline of a former star. For years, Finland was a role model for excellent academic performance. Education officials visited from around the world to learn about its progressive approaches. But the country has dropped 60 points over the past few testing cycles – equivalent to losing three full school years of education. I suspect we won’t be hearing calls to teach the Finnish way anymore. “You have to be careful because the leaders of today can be the laggards of tomorrow,” said Tom Loveless, an independent researcher who studies international assessments.

There was one bright spot for American students. Fifteen-year-olds scored comparatively well on the PISA reading test, with their scores dropping by just one point while other countries experienced much steeper declines. But that good news is also tempered by the most recent scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) test, often called the Nation’s Report Card. Reading scores of fourth and eighth graders deteriorated over the last two testing cycles in 2019 and 2022.

Overall, the PISA results provide additional confirmation that U.S. students are in trouble, especially in math, and we can’t put all the blame on the pandemic.

This story about the 2022 PISA results was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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In 2017, public interest lawyers sued California because they claimed that too many low-income Black and Hispanic children weren’t learning to read at school. Filed on behalf of families and teachers at three schools with pitiful reading test scores, the suit was an effort to establish a constitutional right to read. However, before the courts resolved that legal question, the litigants settled the case in 2020. 

The settlement itself was noteworthy. The state agreed to give an extra $50 million to 75 elementary schools with the worst reading scores in the state to improve how they were teaching reading. Targeted at children who were just learning to read in kindergarten through third grade, the settlement amounted to a little more than $1,000 extra per student. Teachers were trained in evidence-based ways of teaching reading, including an emphasis on phonics and vocabulary. (A few of the 75 original schools didn’t participate or closed down.)

A pair of Stanford University education researchers studied whether the settlement made a difference, and their conclusion was that yes, it did. Third graders’ reading scores in 2022 and 2023 rose relative to their peers at comparable schools that weren’t eligible for the settlement payments. Researchers equated the gains to an extra 25 percent of a year of learning.

This right-to-read settlement took place during the pandemic when school closures led to learning losses; reading scores had declined sharply statewide and nationwide. However, test scores were strikingly stable at the schools that benefited from the settlement. More than 30 percent of the third graders at these lowest performing schools continued to reach Level 2 or higher on the California state reading tests, about the same as in 2019. Third grade reading scores slid at comparison schools between 2019 and 2022 and only began to recover in 2023. (Level 2 equates to slightly below grade-level proficiency with “standard nearly met” but is above the lowest Level 1 “standard not met.”) State testing of all students doesn’t begin until third grade and so there was no standard measure for younger kindergarten, first and second graders.

The settlement’s benefits can seem small. The majority of children in these schools still cannot read well. Even with these reading improvements, more than 65 percent of the students still scored at the lowest of the four levels on the state’s reading test.  But their reading gains are meaningful in the context of a real-life classroom experience for more than 7,000 third graders over two years, not merely a laboratory experiment or a small pilot program. The researchers characterized the reading improvements as larger than those seen in 90 percent of large-scale classroom interventions, according to a 2023 study. They also conducted a cost-benefit analysis and determined that the $50 million literacy program created by the settlement was 13 times more effective than a typical dollar spent at schools. 

“I wouldn’t call the results super large. I would call them cost effective,” said Jennifer Jennings, a sociologist at Princeton University who was not involved in the study, but attended a presentation of the working paper in November. 

The working paper, “The Achievement Effects of Scaling Early Literacy Reforms,” was posted to the website of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University on Dec. 4, 2023. It has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and may still be revised.

Thomas Dee, an economist at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education who conducted the analysis with doctoral student Sarah Novicoff, says that the reading improvements at the weakest schools in California bolster the evidence for the so-called “science of reading” approach, which has become associated with phonics instruction, but also includes pre-phonics sound awareness, reading fluency, vocabulary building and comprehension skills. Thus far, the best real-world evidence for the science of reading comes from Mississippi, where reading scores dramatically improved after schools changed how they taught reading. But there’s also been a debate over whether the state’s policy to hold weak readers back in third grade has been a bigger driver of the test score gains than the instructional changes. 

The structure of the right-to-read settlement offers a possible blueprint for how to bring evidence-based teaching practices into more classrooms, says Stanford’s Dee. School administrators and teachers both received training in the science of reading approach, but then schools were given the freedom to create their own plans and spend their share of the settlement funds as they saw fit within certain guidelines. The Sacramento County Office of Education served as an outside administrator, approving plans and overseeing them.

“How to drive research to inform practice within schools and within classrooms is the central problem we face in education policy,” said Dee. “When I look at this program, it’s an interesting push and pull of how to do that. Schools were encouraged to do their own planning and tailor what they were doing to their own circumstances. But they also had oversight from a state-designated agency that made sure the money was getting where it was supposed to, that they were doing things in a well-conceived way.”  

Some schools hired reading coaches to work with teachers on a regular basis. Others hired more aides to tutor children in small groups. Schools generally elected to spend most of the settlement money on salaries for new staff and extra compensation for current teachers to undergo retraining and less on new instructional materials, such as books or curriculums. By contrast, New York City’s current effort to reform reading instruction began with new curriculum requirements and teachers are complaining that they haven’t received the training to make the new curriculum work.

It’s unclear if this combination of retraining and money would be as effective in typical schools. The lowest performing schools that received the money tended to be staffed by many younger, rookie teachers who were still learning their craft. These new teachers may have been more open to adopting a new science of reading approach than veteran teachers who have years of experience teaching another way. 

That teacher retraining victory may foretell a short-lived success story for the students in these schools. The reason that there were so many new teachers is because teachers quickly burn out and quit high-poverty schools. The newly trained teachers in the science of reading may soon quit too. There’s a risk that all the investment in better teaching could soon evaporate. I’ll be curious to see their reading scores a few years from now.

This story about the right to read settlement was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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