While we are now several years removed from the pandemic, work continues to remediate its inadequate substitutes for in-person teaching and learning. Tutoring emerged as a favored response from schools. But the type, amount, and quality matter if academic outcomes are going to rebound. A recent study focuses on a specific aspect of tutoring quality to determine its value to students: the instructional and curricular alignment between tutoring and the classroom.
Researchers Cara Jackson and Ayman Shakeel, from the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting and Abt Global, respectively, conducted a randomized control trial in a single school district in Tennessee during the 2024–25 school year at the request of district leaders. In a new Chalkbeat article, those leaders explain that their schools had been providing literacy tutoring to hundreds of students for years in hopes of boosting academic achievement, but their data showed that “students were not exiting intervention” and were instead becoming “intervention lifers”—running in place just to keep from falling further behind. Believing that the culprit was instructional misalignment between tutoring and the regular school classroom,[1] the district spent the last of its pandemic relief funding to purchase as many instructionally-aligned tutoring materials as they could afford, tried them out on as many kids as they could accommodate, and hired Jackson and Shakeel to evaluate the results.
The trial was a small one: 296 total students in grades K through 3, all of whom scored below the 40th percentile on the aimswebPlus literacy diagnostic administered at the start of the 2024–25 school year. Of these students, 179 were randomly assigned to the instructionally-aligned treatment group (the most that could be accommodated) and 117 to the business-as-usual control group. Tutoring took place either in the classroom or in a separate room of their school building, with tutoring group size regularly varied for both treatment and control students. Some control group students used a computer for their tutoring from time to time, but no treatment group students ever did. As was typical in the district, control group tutoring could be led by paraprofessionals or teachers. Treatment group tutors were exclusively teachers, in order to maximize alignment between tutoring and classroom instruction. Sessions for both groups were intended to occur daily, but teacher and student absences throughout the year lessened the true dosages. Session lengths were not prescribed and varied daily, averaging around 41 minutes per session for both groups.
Jackson and Shakeel find that treatment group students scored an average of 0.12 standard deviations higher than students in the control group on end-of-year aimswebPlus testing, which is statistically significant. They also find a positive impact for instructionally-aligned tutoring of 0.17 standard deviations on the state’s standardized ELA exam, though that effect falls below statistical significance. Treatment effects are strongest for boys and for the lowest-performing students at the start of the year. More interestingly, students do better when tutoring sessions are conducted by adults who did not hold a master’s degree, be they licensed teachers or paraprofessionals. The researchers surmise that these younger, less-experienced tutors stuck more closely to the curricular expectations of the tutoring materials than their older, more-experienced peers. Additionally, tutoring group size appeared to matter—all else being equal—with the highest impacts seen in tutoring groups comprising four students; no more, no less. No explanation is proffered for this curious finding.
In the end, the researchers urge a cautious interpretation of their findings (instructionally-aligned tutoring might be a way to boost students out of “intervention lifer” status) and more investigation. They would love to have more specific data on absenteeism, more details about which adults were conducting which tutoring sessions, and of course, more students in both groups. The district in question, they write, was immediately “working to expand the instructionally aligned tutoring,” although their Covid funding has long run out and the resulting expansion is going to be far more ad hoc than their initial effort as studied here. None of which bodes well for district students, regardless of how long the remediation effort continues.
SOURCE: Cara Jackson and Ayman Shakeel, “Creating Coherence: Does Instructional Alignment Affect the Impact of Tutoring?” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (November 2025).
[1] In this report, “alignment” is defined as curriculum, instruction, and assessment—including tutoring—acting as “a unified system for common learning goals.” In the district, alignment was actualized by purchasing tutoring materials from the same company from which they sourced their English language arts curricula.
