High-Dosage Tutoring and Reading Achievement: Evidence from New York City

Roland Fryer () and Meghan Howard Noveck

No 23792, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This study examines the impact on student achievement of high-dosage reading tutoring for middle school students in New York City Public Schools, using a school-level randomized field experiment. Across three years, schools offered at least 130 hours of 4-on-1 tutoring based on a guided reading model, which consisted of 1-on-1 read alouds, independent reading, vocabulary review, and group discussion. We show that, at the mean, tutoring has a positive and significant effect on school attendance, a positive, but insignificant, effect on English Language Arts (ELA) state test scores and no effect on math state test scores. There is important heterogeneity by race. For black students, our treatment increased attendance by 2.0 percentage points (control mean 92.4 percent) and ELA scores by 0.09 standard deviations per year – two times larger than the effect of the Promise Academy Middle School in the Harlem Children’s Zone and KIPP Charter Middle Schools on reading achievement. For Hispanic students, the treatment effect is 0.8 percentage points on attendance (control mean 92.0 percent) and 0.01 standard deviations per year on ELA scores. We argue that the difference between the effectiveness of tutoring for black and Hispanic students is best explained by the average tutor characteristics at the schools they attend.

JEL-codes: I20 J0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-exp and nep-ure
Note: CH ED LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23792.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23792

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23792

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().