Dear Academic Approach Families & Colleagues:
A brief from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research and the Annenberg Institute at Brown University reviews research posing an essential question: what academic interventions and what strategies should schools prioritize?
What works?
- Frequent tutoring tied to core academic content (and designed to support students with their classroom work) can help students learn faster and lessen gaps in achievement
- Increasing time students spend learning has strong evidence of impact
- Strong systems to identify early student warning signs—while building strong norms and routines—help students engage academically
- Supportive relationships with adults are predictive of students’ resilience and ability to respond to adversity
What does not work?
- Teaching extra content without providing more personalized support for students does not work; in other words, compressing content through extra homework or more content in the same class period does not work
- Grade retention (or holding students back a year) also led to negative effects
Much of this research continues to encourage our work this year to provide carefully designed academic tutoring solutions for families and schools and to leverage standardized test preparation as well for rigorous, academic support to grow scores and skills by Teaching Beyond the Test.
Be well,
Matthew Pietrafetta, Ph.D., Founder & CEO