High-dosage, in-person tutoring gets , recent research suggests. But as federal funding for remediation dries up and schools struggle to raise students’ post-COVID skills, educators have been hoping for a lifeline in the form of live, online tutoring.

While virtual tutors still work directly with students in real time, they can work from anywhere, expanding the potential talent pool and lowering costs.

Until recently, virtual tutoring had that it works very well, with few rigorous studies of its effectiveness. But new findings, including two recent studies from Johns Hopkins University’s , are beginning to offer a different narrative: Done well and with the same safeguards as traditional in-person tutoring, the virtual version can be nearly as good.

“I was always one of those people who was so skeptical — ‘it’s never going to work,’” said Amanda Neitzel, an assistant professor at Hopkins and the research center’s deputy director. “And then I did these studies, and I was shocked, because it did work.”

In a quasi-experimental study , Neitzel and her colleagues found that first-graders in Massachusetts who used , a one-to-one virtual tutoring program, made substantial progress in reading, with the percentage of students reading on grade level rising from just 16% in the fall to about 50% by spring.

The share of “struggling” readers also dropped, from 64% in the fall to 28% by the spring.

The study tracked about 1,900 students in 13 high-poverty Massachusetts school districts in the 2023-24 school year. The data suggest that tutored students showed nearly five-and-a-half months’ more progress on a key reading test than the typical student. And they improved across the board, with English learners, students with disabilities and low-income students all gaining ground.

Ignite tutors work with students for 15 minutes every day, typically during “literacy blocks” in class or in separate, staff-monitored rooms.

In a separate, more rigorous study , Neitzel and her colleagues found that students who got online tutoring outperformed their peers by about two points on NWEA reading assessments, a “significant” change that would raise the average student slightly to the 55th percentile in the class, or just above average.

While researchers saw no difference in impacts for English language learners or those with special needs, they found that first-graders got more out of the tutoring, meaning that the hypothetical 50th-percentile student who got tutoring would rise to the 58th percentile.

Six elementary schools in a district in Texas took part in the randomized controlled trial evaluating Air Reading for 418 first-through-sixth-grade students during the 2023-24 school year. The small-group tutoring ran for just a few months in the spring, from late January through April.

Neitzel said the effect sizes in the two new studies aren’t necessarily as large as those of the most effective in-person models, but the new evidence provides some of the most compelling evidence yet for schools wondering whether they should offer virtual tutoring. 

“It’s really exciting that every month or two there’s another out,” she said. “And there are more in the field right now too. So I think in the next couple years, we’ll be able to answer that question better.”

Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, agreed, saying several to amount to “ on the efficacy of virtual tutoring programs,” suggesting they hold promise.

He noted that randomized control trials generally find that virtual tutoring has positive effects, but often of smaller magnitude than those found in meta-analyses of in-person tutoring programs. “However, the devil is in the specific program design details,” he said. For instance, several studies find that one-on-one virtual tutoring is more effective than programs that use small groups.

Jennifer Krajewski, director of outreach and engagement for , a clearinghouse for research-proven tutoring models housed at Johns Hopkins’ Center for Research and Reform in Education, noted that both Air Reading and Ignite Reading employ well-trained live tutors and a “highly structured” program, with ongoing coaching for tutors and a clear instructional process that addresses students’ individual needs. These characteristics, she said, are often part of in-person tutoring programs that have been found effective.

Both programs work hard at getting students to actually attend, she and Neitzel said. 

Reviewing the Ignite study, Neitzel said the percentage of students actually receiving tutoring when they were supposed to was “shockingly high,” topping 85% for the vast majority of students. That suggests implementation is key in a field where attendance isn’t always tracked very well. 

“You could have the best model in the world, but if the kids aren’t actually there, it’s not going to move the needle,” she said.

Attendance remains one of virtual tutoring’s biggest challenges, she said. “When it’s a physical person in the building, they can pull you out of class. It’s harder to avoid. Whereas if it’s on a computer, you just don’t log in — or you log off, or [you say], ‘Oh, it’s not working.’ ”

Krajewski said that for the study, Ignite worked with a local funder in Massachusetts to hire on-the-ground workers who ensured that students were showing up. It also held regular virtual meetings with educators “to make sure everyone understood the milestones and the goals,” ensuring that the program would be launched consistently across several districts. “Everyone was really on the same page because of these meetings,” she said.

Ignite and the local funder also appointed paid school and district “champions” to supervise implementation. Each school champion worked about three hours weekly to troubleshoot problems that arose. And they required that schools review student achievement data weekly, moving students out of tutoring when they succeeded and filling those seats with struggling students. 

Neitzel said one of the keys to Ignite’s success, at least in the study, was that it paired students with tutors who spoke the same language, offering “a little connection” between them, even if tutoring took place primarily in English.

If schools can’t find enough bilingual teachers locally, she said, “maybe virtual tutoring is the best option you have.” In-person tutoring programs might be slightly more effective, she said, but virtual programs offer flexibility on hiring and other challenging aspects of implementation. 

In the Air Reading study, Neitzel said, company representatives met with schools every other week, focusing closely on attendance and which students weren’t attending sessions.

On occasion, she said, Air Reading teams flew out to schools “to make sure stuff was happening and getting set up or trying to troubleshoot what’s going on. I was impressed with just how well they knew the schools they were working with.”

In one case, she recalled an Air Reading worker who was so attuned to the school he oversaw that he knew an attendance monitor’s father had died. “That’s how involved they are with this,” Neitzel said. “When it works well, there are these tremendous relationships with people in the district to make it work.”

Krajewski, who was not an author on either study, said researchers haven’t yet seen evidence of effectiveness for tutoring using AI agents working directly with students. “We’ve seen that the most effective models use human tutors,” she said. 

Hopkins researchers are working on an evaluation of an AI-assisted tutoring model developed by Carnegie Mellon University and predicted there’d be noteworthy data by the end of 2025. “But even then, it’s not that the tutoring is replaced by AI,” she said. The AI, she said, is helping human tutors be more effective.

“These studies show how important that human tutor continues to be,” she said. “We’re learning that that human tutor, virtual or in person, is driving the instructional process.” 

Correction: An earlier version of this story included graphics that mischaracterized the amount of benefit students gained from the two virtual tutoring programs.

The new year brought changes to requirements for New Jersey teachers, including a new law eliminating a basic skills test that lawmakers overwhelmingly advanced in both houses.

Gov. Phil Murphy signed the  eliminating the Praxis basic skills test for people seeking teaching certifications in June, and it went into effect Jan. 1. Lawmakers said the legislation aimed to address a l and remove duplicative, costly tests that create barriers to pursuing a career in education.

At the time, it faced little controversy. Just three Republicans voted against it.

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But recent comments from tech mogul Elon Musk have shined a spotlight on the new law. Musk, who owns social media platform X, this week  of an article about the change and questioned if teachers in New Jersey need to “know how to read.” The post has been viewed nearly 20 million times.

Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia (R-Sussex), who supported the bill, said the change to teacher certification requirements has been taken entirely out of context and does not lower the bar for would-be teachers.

“My largest concern was it was an extra expense for teachers just starting out, and for taking a test, actually, that is much easier than the current tests you already have to take,” said Fantasia, who obtained her teaching certificate in 2008 and now works as an administrator at a charter school.

She explained that for teachers to receive certification in New Jersey, they must first graduate from an accredited teacher preparation program with at least a 3.0 grade point average, complete months of student teaching, and pass several exams, depending on the grade level and subject matter being taught.

Those tests can easily amount to hundreds of dollars, and by the time a potential teacher takes the Praxis exam, they’ve already proved their capabilities, she said.

States across the country have removed similar exams in an effort to ease shortages plaguing schools, according to the . Oklahoma enacted a law in 2022 removing the requirement for a general education exam, and Arizona implemented a law allowing educators to begin teaching before graduating from college.

Fantasia did not fault Musk for his confusion about the law and placed some blame on the media — fringe and mainstream — for irresponsible headlines and missing context. The knee-jerk reaction from the public is to be “completely expected,” she said.

And while she noted she’s the loudest Republican voice supporting the legislation, she slammed Democrats for remaining “radio silent” on a bill they supported. The bill sponsors did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

“The teachers of New Jersey are made to look across this country like the village idiots because the Democrat Party who sponsored this bill and the governor who signed it don’t feel it necessary to defend them when the headlines are extraordinarily misleading,” Fantasia said.

Murphy’s office defended the law in a statement to the New Jersey Monitor.

“The Praxis Core requirement was redundant to New Jersey’s other requirements for teacher certification that remain in place, and its removal was a recommendation of our public school staff shortage task force, a group of experts who know more about New Jersey’s education needs than Elon Musk,” said Natalie Hamilton, a Murphy spokeswoman. “The bipartisan legislation that the Governor signed passed by overwhelming margins and we are disappointed by out-of-state agitators that want more red tape.”

Steven Baker, spokesman for teachers union the New Jersey Education Association, said “right-wing blog sites trying to push this story don’t understand the law and definitely do not understand New Jersey’s very rigorous teacher certification standards.”

He stressed that the additional requirement to pass the Praxis following years of other coursework did nothing to elevate the standards and “amounted to a corporate money grab” from college students.

Sen. Joe Pennacchio (R-Morris), who voted against the bill, said he thinks it has indeed lowered standards.

“I think these are the days of dumbing down, and somebody’s got to put their foot down and say, ‘Absolutely not,’” he said. “We should expect more from these kids, not less, and we certainly should expect no less from the teachers that are teaching them.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com.

Oh, and they’re fun.

That sophistication — and a bit of that fun — may soon be coming to school assessments.

Educators and developers are increasingly looking to the digital world of games and simulations to make tests more stealthy, playful and, they hope, useful. In the process, the new assessments may also push schools to become more creative.

“The idea is: Can assessment be more embedded?” said Y.J. Kim, an at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Can assessment be more exciting? Can assessment be more flexible?”

In November, NWEA, which publishes the widely used , unveiled a 3D digital assessment on the popular that tests how well middle-schoolers have learned Newton’s .

The game, called Distance Dash, requires two students to work together to launch vehicles of different sizes and payloads. The goal: Get both to the finish line in perfect sync.

Students pick a skateboard, a bike, a grocery cart or an automobile, load each with different items, then collaboratively fine-tune the forces placed on them. The whole time, the game covertly measures several objectives, including whether students understand the principles of acceleration and how to apply optimal force.

Tyler Matta, NWEA’s vice president of learning sciences engineering, said the assessment grew out of the , which require students to analyze and interpret data and understand patterns.

He said helping design it was a stretch for NWEA test makers, who hadn’t previously worked with game designers. “We got to see what goes into building educational games, which was all very novel for us. We learned a ton.”

The organization is working with developer , which has produced . 

“As an assessment, it’s important that you actually have the ability to fail,” explained Filament’s Kenny Green, the project’s producer. The data it generates — for instance, how many times students tried and what modifications they made — are all important for teachers to see. 

The new exam appears as Roblox, the popular gaming platform, moves further into schools. Last October, it said it’ll to expand educational experiences on its platform, two years after an initial $10 million outlay. 

Rebecca Kantar, Roblox’s head of education, said physics lends itself well to such collaborative simulations. Distance Dash, she said, is “representative of the kind of team-based problem solving real scientists do when they’re working through a physics problem in real life.” 

Another recent development: In 2022, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development assessed creative thinking for 15-year-old students in more than 60 countries via the assessment, which boasts interactive items that allow students to submit drawings with a . 

The test also includes open-ended tasks with “no single solution but multiple correct responses,” organizers said. The first results are expected this year.

Advocates hope to someday make tests more personalized and, in many ways, indistinguishable from games, said Bo Stjerne Thomsen of the . “What we hope is that playfulness becomes a serious part of assessment,” he said.

Better still, more playful tests, he said, could open the door for schools to offer more creative, inquiry-based learning. 

He and others who are support the new tests don’t mince words: They envision a world where the kind of high-stakes, multiple-choice tests we all grew up with give way to assessments that for the first time allow teachers to capture a broader array of “non-cognitive qualities” such as teamwork and creativity, while keeping students focused on learning.

“Every time you try to pause an experience or stop a learning experience, it actually stops the engagement,” said Thomsen. It’s the same with play: “As soon as you start measuring play, the play stops.”

‘It’s about you engaging with someone else’

Tests can also be demotivating, even though they’re designed to help students show what they’ve learned, said Yigal Rosen, who led the creation of the PISA test.

He recalled interviewing fourth-graders who had taken NAEP science exams: At least one-third of the questions, according to students, were “super boring” and not engaging.

“They will skip them,” Rosen said. “They will just select ‘Whatever.’”

Now the chief academic officer at , the learning software company, Rosen recalled that when his team tweaked the NAEP test with a “playful version” that invited students to work together, he said, scores rose by 50%. “It’s no longer about you just responding to this dry prompt,” he said. “It’s about you engaging with someone else.”

When they think of playful assessments, most teachers probably think of digital tools like the popular learning platform , which allows teachers to create game show-like quizzes and polls that engage students on mobile phones and other devices. Louisa Rosenheck, Kahoot’s director of pedagogy, admitted that testing, for all its progress, is “still an underdeveloped, untapped area.” 

Digital tools like Kahoot that help teachers do informal assessments as they teach are helpful because they “feel more low-stakes” than traditional tests. “It’s very quick, it’s informative. You can get feedback very, very easily,” she said. “But the question types, the formats, often are still kind of discrete items.”

In that sense, she said, they don’t take advantage of what good games can do: Collect extensive data on students’ thinking and decision making — much more important indicators than whether they got the correct result. But that’s expensive, so many educational games simply assess how far a player gets and how many tasks or levels she completes.

‘Stealth assessment’

Researchers have been toying with the idea of more playful assessments for decades. Nearly 20 years ago, researcher began looking at ways to seamlessly weave tests directly into the fabric of instruction.

Shute devised the idea of “stealth assessment,” a system that discreetly tests students’ learning in interactive and immersive environments such as digital games. 

Aside from offering a less obtrusive way to measure learning, stealth assessment aimed to help with “flow,” the mental state in which a person is so engaged and exhilarated by a task that they forget they’re working. 

For most students, any exhilaration melts when test time nears.

“Assessment is inherently about power,” said the University of Wisconsin’s Kim. “Assessment is inherently about evidence and rules.”

By contrast, the new kinds of assessments empower students to challenge and question rules. In one proposed scenario, students in the PISA creativity test are asked to build a paper airplane, then come up with ideas to improve it.

In another, students design a “bicycle of the future,” suggesting three original improvements over standard bikes. Then they’re asked to tweak the design of a proposed anti-theft camera mounted on the bike. Finally, since the future bicycle is automatically powered, they must suggest “an original way to reuse or repurpose” the pedals.

“The idea should be original,” the test says, “in the sense that not many students would think of it.”

Kim has spent the past few years developing playful assessments for the classroom, originally with teachers, teacher trainees and game designers at MIT. Where Shute, her mentor at Florida State University, called it “stealth assessment,” Kim prefers the term “playful assessment.”

‘It’s a mind shift’

Kim has lately been testing something she calls the , a free, printable card game for teachers that Kim describes as “Charades meets Telephone” to teach the process of drawing conclusions from a chain of evidence.

In the game, players take on one of three roles: Performer, Observer or Interpreter. They can only see one of the other two players, and gameplay proceeds as the performer silently acts out, in three movements or less, what’s on a card. The observer takes notes on what she sees and determines how to tell the interpreter what she saw. 

Like many in the field, Kim said a big roadblock to more playful tests is that so many school systems use assessments for teacher evaluations. “At the end of the day, we are obsessed with the idea that ‘Assessment is score: score about performance and proficiency.’”

Meanwhile, for most educators, play “is not something that is productive,” she said. “So for teachers to kind of switch their mindset in terms of, ‘Assessment can be fun, and this is an assessment,’ it’s a mind shift.”

, which relies largely on recent findings from outside research groups and the federal government, warns that on just about every indicator that matters — basic skills, college going, mental health and more — the pandemic has set older students back.

“Time is running out for these kids,” said Robin Lake, director of , a research organization at Arizona State University. “Many have already exited the K-12 system, either by graduating or essentially disappearing on us. Too many kids still are missing — we don’t know if they’ve dropped out or where they’ve gone.”

Outside researchers who study these students said the fears are justified. In response, Lake and others are proposing a raft of reforms, including extending “gap years” to any high school graduates who need time to catch up — as well as a new commitment to reforming high school so it works for more students. 

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona acknowledged the slow pace of academic turnaround, calling it “appalling and unacceptable.”

“It’s like as a country we’ve normalized those gaps,” he said in separate remarks to reporters Tuesday,

Cardona spoke just before the department unveiled new efforts to spur pandemic recovery, including $50 million in competitive grants for literacy and higher expectations on districts to track and reverse chronic absenteeism. The department also released new data showing that roughly 187,000 tutors and mentors have signed up through its National Partnership for Student Success — bringing it closer to its goal of recruiting 250,000 adults to help students get back on track by 2025.

‘Insidious and hidden’

As of this fall, researchers said, about 13.5 million students in four high school graduating classes have been affected by the pandemic.

CRPE first issued its “State of the American Student” report in September 2022, saying pandemic school closures in 2020 and 2021 led to “unprecedented academic setbacks” for American students that made pre-existing inequalities and the nation’s youth mental health crisis worse.

A year later, CRPE says, students are still struggling in many areas. They point to record-low math and reading scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress for fourth- and eighth-grade students — in both grades, one in three can’t read at even the “basic” achievement level.

And missed more than 10% of school days during the 2021-22 school year, twice as many as in previous years. More than reported “stunted behavioral and social-emotional development” in students because of the pandemic, researchers note.

But they say schools should pay extra attention to older students, many of whom lost critical instruction time during the pandemic. 

The pandemic, Lake said, “is continuing to derail learning throughout K-12. But what we came away with was that the derailment is looking a little bit more insidious and hidden, in some ways. That is true especially for older students.”

The , for instance, needs 7.4 months of schooling to catch up to pre-pandemic levels in reading, and 9.1 months of schooling in math, according to recent assessments.

Last year’s NAEP scores showed that 30% of eighth graders performed “” in reading; 38% were in math. At the same time, just 2% of students received at school, which Lake called “a massive missed opportunity.” 

In a few places, researchers noted, the pandemic knocked older students off track, as in Washington state, where 14 percent of public high school students received at least during the 2020-2021 school year.

Even college-bound high school students are underperforming: The on the ACT college admission test last year was 19.8, they noted, the lowest since 1991.

Researchers also noted that, overall, college going is down: Between 2019 and 2023, the U.S. higher education system lost an estimated .

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday in advance of the report’s release, Lake said recent data on college are “extremely concerning.”

She called for the development of what she calls a “New American High School” that abandons academic tracking and standardized diplomas for a system that helps each student “understand their own conception of a good life” through knowledge and skills. It would also help them more easily change course if needed.

In the report, Lake noted several promising new models, including Colorado’s , designed to help rural districts create career-relevant learning experiences aligned to the needs and aspirations of local economies.

She also highlighted Seckinger High School in Gwinnett County, Georgia, a planned artificial intelligence-themed high school that will offer a college prep curriculum “taught through the lens of artificial intelligence.” Students will also be able to pursue an education in developing AI, she said. 

A gap year for struggling students

Lake proposed that high schools and community colleges consider a new kind of post-high school “gap year” designed to help struggling high school graduates get back on track academically and prepare for college and careers. 

“Gap years are oftentimes known for serving as a time for exploration for more advantaged kids,” she said. “Let’s change that.”

The idea is still in development, she said, but could be developed quickly.

“We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but we need to get going,” she said.

While high school graduation rates are rising, the researchers said, so is grade inflation — 90% of parents believe their child is actually above grade level in reading and math, according to a March 2023 , making it likely that many students are exiting the K-12 system unprepared for college and careers.

Outside experts who study education systems and secondary education said CRPE’s alarm over the data is justified.

“There’s going to be a long tail of the pandemic,” said Robert Balfanz, a scholar who studies high school as co-director of the at Johns Hopkins University.

He said a key problem from the pandemic is that many students were forced into virtual learning at key points in their education: while making the leap to more challenging reading, for instance, or diving into Algebra or calculus. “Kids that miss core transitional learning, I think, are almost hit twice,” he said. “They have that same amount of learning loss. But you could argue in some ways it was even more strategic of a loss because those are such key building blocks.”

He noted that the best predictor of whether a student will earn a college degree is if they earned “decent grades in challenging courses.” But if they don’t get access to these or don’t learn foundational material, “that’s a problem.”

Unequal access to such coursework, Balfanz said, can push students out of advanced classes. 

He is concerned that during the pandemic, many students who “officially took calculus” or other advanced courses virtually may not have gotten all of the material required. “And those kids are probably already in college.”

In the paper, researchers lamented that our K-12 system “leaves to chance” nearly every aspect of the transition from high school to college and careers, from students discovering their interests and talents to selecting a career pathway aligned to them. 

And few students ever get guidance on how to change careers and find new training or postsecondary opportunities when their interests and priorities shift.

Balfanz said the decline in “postsecondary momentum” could be the result of many factors, including the high cost of college, students who don’t feel well-prepared and a labor market that holds many opportunities for high wages without a college degree.

“I think a combination of those factors is going to push some kids to delay post-secondary,” he said. “And the more you delay it, the odds of success are less.”

Trying to go back to school at that point, he said, is “always challenging.” 

A new kind of report card

Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research () at the American Institutes for Research, said COVID recovery “has not fully happened” in many schools. 

“I’m not feeling super optimistic about pandemic recovery writ large right now,” he said. 

The new CRPE report, he said, demonstrates the “real conundrum” that schools face in communicating with parents: “I think that schools need to convey in more plain English where kids are at,” he said. 

But he said results from large-scale standardized exams “don’t resonate the way that information about their own students would resonate. What we need is for school systems to just be really clear with individual families about when their students are struggling. And I don’t think that school systems typically do that.”

Educators, he said, are typically optimistic about students’ chances of bouncing back — and fearful of being blamed for kids’ academic problems. 

“Schools don’t have a ton of incentive to communicate in ways that might negatively bounce back to them,” he said.

Lake, the CRPE director, said one good way to fix this problem is simply to rethink report cards.

“Parents look to report cards first,” she said. “And report cards need to be able to say how the kids are actually doing — not just that they’re getting a particular grade. Are they mastering the skills that they need to graduate? Are they on track? And so that’s where I’d focus my efforts.”

Linda Jacobson contributed to this report.