Public elementary schools throughout the nation have hired increased numbers of support staff, including literacy tutors, through federal Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief (ESSER) grant funding. Prior research on volunteer tutors and preservice teachers highlights the potential impact of tutoring on student learning outcomes. Yet…

Concern about the state of literacy instruction in America's classrooms has recently exploded. As a result, policymakers, school system leaders, and teachers have increasingly sought to remake how children learn to read in order to improve literacy outcomes--a pursuit that has gained heightened urgency in the aftermath of the pandemic. This work,…

Children with externalized behavioral problems (BP) are at increased risk of being affected by a lack of social skills and academic engagement, and reading difficulties can frequently occur. Peer-tutoring (PT) interventions demonstrably promote both positive behavior and academic outcomes. To foster these effects, using interdependent group-reward…

A quasi-experimental study examined some effects of cross-age tutoring on fourth grade tutors' and second grade tutees' ability to spell accurately and correct errors on their own rough drafts. Half of the participating tutors were trained in tutoring skills; half were not. All participants were given pre- and post-assessments. On dictated writing…

Acting as a tutor can increase a student's academic skills. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relative effectiveness of two types of reading fluency building strategies--echo reading and error correction--for the fluency improvement of tutors. Forty lower performing readers were trained in echo reading and error correction. Then,…

The goal of the current research was to better understand when and why feedback has positive effects on learning and to identify features of feedback that may improve its efficacy. In a randomized experiment, second-grade children (N = 75) received instruction on a correct problem-solving strategy and then solved a set of relevant problems.…

This study evaluates the impacts and costs of the Reading Partners program, which uses community volunteers to provide one-on-one tutoring to struggling readers in under-resourced elementary schools. The evaluation uses an experimental design. Students were randomly assigned within 19 different Reading Partners sites to a program or control…

To close the gap between reading research and the reality of instruction, the authors developed a reading comprehension approach for elementary school, aiming at explicit instruction and practice of reading comprehension strategies. Their approach encompasses two complementary cornerstones: explicit instruction in reading strategies and creating…

With the push for adequate yearly progress (AYP), educators must find cost-effective strategies improve learning for all students. Tutoring has been found to be an effective strategy for improving students' learning. However, little research has been done to determine the influence of pre-service teachers as tutors. This quantitative,…

This study attempted to determine whether giving lower performing tutors preferential instruction over their higher performing tutees before they engage in peer tutoring sessions may help increase the reading achievement for these lower performing tutors. The preferential instruction consisted of giving adult-delivered instruction in a targeted…

We trained parents to tutor their child through implementing a repeated reading procedure designed to increase oral reading fluency. Our study was conducted over a two-week winter break at the homes of the parent and child. Baseline data for each child were collected using curriculum-based measurement (CBM) to determine an instructional reading…

This article presents a case study investigating the effectiveness of interventions designed to improve second language and reading proficiency of a seven-year-old Chinese-speaking ELL, Xin Wei, who completed second grade at a diverse metropolitan elementary school in the U.S. While a single case study cannot answer all the questions that arise as…

This study directly compared the academic gains of reciprocal peer tutoring, nonreciprocal peer tutoring, and a waiting-list control group. Participants included 59 elementary students from second-, third-, and fourth-grade classrooms who performed below average on curriculum-based measurement (CBM) math probes. Students involved in peer tutoring…

This study attempted to determine whether giving lower-performing tutors preferential treatment over their higher-performing tutees before they engaged in peer tutoring sessions may help increase the reading achievement for these lower-performing tutors. The preferential treatment consisted of giving teacher-delivered instruction in a targeted…

This meta-analysis assesses the effectiveness of volunteer tutoring programs for improving the academic skills of students enrolled in public schools Grades K-8 in the United States and further investigates for whom and under what conditions tutoring can be effective. The authors found 21 studies (with 28 different study cohorts in those studies)…