Closing the income-achievement gap? Experimental evidence from high-dosage tutoring in Dutch primary education

Abstract

We present experimental evidence on a high-dosage tutoring (HDT) program implemented in three primary schools in a low-income neighborhood in the Netherlands. We document treatment effects of 0.28 national population standard deviations in math achievement scores (p<0.01) after one school year. These treatment effects are sizable and can account for roughly 40% of the math achievement gap between low-income and high-income students in the Netherlands. As most of the evidence on intensive tutoring programs draws on research from low-income settings in the US, our findings show that (i.) HDT programs can be successfully built from the ground up and exported to different institutional settings while maintaining meaningful effect sizes, and, (ii.) existing income-achievement gaps can be substantially reduced with practical and scalable interventions like HDT.

A Blueprint for Scaling Tutoring and Mentoring Across Public Schools

“…Our blueprint centers on 10 core design principles to guide federally funded, locally operated programs. We draw heavily on models of high-dosage tutoring where students work with the same tutor as part of a regular class during the school day (de Ree et al, 2021; Guryan et al, 2021; Kraft, 2015) and augment this approach with elements of modern school-based mentoring programs (Lyons et al, 2019; Wheeler et al, 2010). 1…”

“…Studies suggest that tutoring can be effective for students across the full distribution of achievement, with mixed findings about which students benefit most. Several reviews find that tutoring benefits students at all levels of prior performance (Black et al, 2008; Leung, 2015; Pelligrini et al, 2021; de Ree et al, 2021) with some evidence of larger effects among lower performing students (Kraft, 2015), Black students (Fryer & Howard-Noveck, 2020) and children from low-income families (Carlana & La Ferrara, 2021). A recent evaluation of high-dosage tutoring suggests that standardized tests may not even capture the full extent of the learning gains experienced by low-achieving students due to test floor effects (Guryan et al, 2021).…”