If you’ve seen our previous posts, you know that we’re testing out a tutoring program at Lowell Elementary to see if we can quantify some of the factors that impact student learning.

In this post we’ll look deeper into our data to understand what drives the impact of individual tutors. One major barrier to making any educational intervention repeatably successful is that results usually depend on who is actually implementing the program. In our case, if we want to have confidence that we can increase student learning, we need to understand how our impacts vary by tutor.

Let’s start with…

We’ve spent a lot of time in previous posts discussing education gaps. While closing gaps is clearly the short-term priority, in this post I wanted to take an optimistic look at the longer-term goal: what would it take to get the students in our program above grade level? In other words, is it possible to leverage our insights to move the most disadvantaged students from “struggling” to “gifted”?

To answer this question, we’ll build on a couple of our recent posts showing that it is possible to get pretty high student growth rates (~2 grade levels of math per year)…

Our last post analyzed the impact of a math tutoring program we are running at Lowell Elementary. In particular, we found that students in our program have math growth rates of ~2.0 grade levels per year. This is big change from their historical growth rates of ~0.6 grade levels per year. In this point I’d like to dig a bit deeper into why we care so much about growth rates, and how it can be tricky to measure them. Finally, I’ll show why we think we’ve got a solid estimate of it for our students. …

2021–03–23: I’ve updated our estimates of growth rates based on our latest data, which is shown in more detail here.

A quick recap:

• We previously described our experiment to close math gaps at Lowell Elementary in downtown Seattle.
• Our last post described the system we’ve built to measure our progress, and I showed what results look like at the individual student level.

In this post I’d to like talk about some early estimates of our program’s impact. As a reminder, our student cohort consists of ten 4th and 5th graders who began our program in late October.

For the folks…

In a set of previous posts I described an experiment we’re running to try to close educational gaps at a local Seattle school. In this post I want to dig into a really important piece of that experiment: how will we know if it worked? In other words, how will we measure our actual impact on how much the students are learning?

This raises the general (and often fraught) question of assessing students. I’ll won’t get into the debate about standardized tests; instead here I’ll focus on what attributes we’d want in a system to measure the impact of a…

This is the third post in a series where we’re documenting an ambitious (crazy?) attempt to fully close educational gaps in math at an elementary school in downtown Seattle. As a quick recap:

• Part 1 describes the school, Lowell Elementary.
• Part 2 describes our program’s approach.

In this piece we’re going to talk about what we’ve seen in the first 6 weeks of the program. Right now we’re working with 10 students in 4th and 5th grade, but based on what we’ve seen so far, we’re looking at expanding the program to more students in January. …

Update: since I first wrote this post, I came across a great book by Zaretta Hammond: Culturally Responsive Teaching. It covers in detail many of the concepts I outline below.

In Part 1 of this series we described Lowell Elementary, a public K-5 school in Seattle where we are attempting to fully close educational gaps in math. In this post I’ll describe the actual program we are using and why we think it may work.

There are a surprisingly small number of programs and interventions that have been rigorously shown to improve math learning for K-12 students. We are trying…

We previously analyzed the feasibility of closing educational gaps at low-income schools in Seattle. We found that by combining math interventions over several years, it should be possible (in theory) to completely close math attainment gaps by 5th grade in most schools.

I’m now working on a program to put that theory into practice, and I’m super excited about it. This is the first in a series of posts where I’ll lay out many of the gory details. I’ll begin by describing the school that I’m working with: Lowell Elementary School. …