College students have the power to transform the tutoring landscape and overcome one of the biggest hurdles in bringing tutoring to scale.

Performance-based funding – a policy in which states fund public colleges based on certain student outcomes, such as how many students graduate – hasn’t benefited all students equally in Tennessee and Ohio. That’s according to a study in which we analyze U.S. Department of Education data on public colleges and universities in these states between 2004-2015.

We compared institutions in Ohio and Tennessee to institutions in states that did not have performance-based funding policies during the same time frame. In some cases, Black, Hispanic, Native American and Alaska Native students did in fact earn more certificates as well as associate and bachelor’s degrees. However, the gap between them and white and Asian students grew even wider for bachelor’s degrees in Ohio and for certificates in Tennessee.

The academics found that there was often a tradeoff between “good teaching” where kids learn stuff and “good teaching” that kids enjoy. Teachers who were good at raising test scores tended to receive low student evaluations. Teachers with great student evaluations tended not to raise test scores all that much.

“The teachers and the teaching practices that can increase test scores often are not the same as those that improve student-reported engagement,” said David Blazar, one of the study’s co-authors and an associate professor of education policy at the University of Maryland College Park. 

Blazar’s study, “Challenges and Tradeoffs of ‘Good’ Teaching: The Pursuit of Multiple Educational Outcomes,” was co-written with Cynthia Pollard, a doctoral student at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. It was publicly posted in June 2022 as a working paper of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. 

It's the largest chunk of federal money ever to hit Rhode Island schools: $645 million for elementary and secondary education, with $580 million going directly to local school districts.

"It really is a huge amount of money," said Professor Nate Schwartz at Brown University's Annenberg Institute.

John B. Diamond, professor of sociology and education policy in Brown University’s department of sociology and Annenberg Institute for School Reform, has been selected by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) to present the 2022 Brown Lecture in Education Research. The public lecture will take place virtually on Thursday, November 3, 6:00–7:30 p.m. ET.

Diamond is a leading scholar in the study of race in education and how it shapes instruction and learning in U.S. schools and school systems. His research focuses on the relationship between social inequality and educational opportunity, examining how leadership, policies, and practices shape students' educational opportunities and outcomes. Diamond is an advisory board member of the American Sociological Association (ASA)’s Sociology Action Network and a national planning team member of the URBAN Research Network. He is an AERA Fellow and served as chair of the AERA Minority Dissertation Fellowship in Education Selection Committee.

The other approach pairs students with one tutor for multiple virtual sessions each week. It’s similar to the kind of “high-dosage” help that’s been shown to deliver strong results in person. 

The small handful of studies that have looked at virtual tutoring during the pandemic saw promising results from this variety. But offerings vary, so it’s tough to say how many students are getting that kind, said Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education at Brown University who’s studying tutoring initiatives.

Today, Results for America and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University released a new EdResearch for Recovery brief by James S. Kim and Zhongyu Wei (Harvard University) sharing evidence-based instructional strategies to improve reading outcomes for K-4 students.

Why It Matters: National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results showed that grade 4 reading scores dropped from 2015 to 2019. During the pandemic, reading performance further declined, with particularly large drops for students in younger grades, students from historically marginalized groups, and students attending high-poverty schools.

This immersive one-day program brings Providence public school students to the Brown University campus to experience a college setting and learn about their opportunities in higher education.

Science and technology instruction is about to get even more engaging than the exciting lessons already in place at Providence’s Vartan Gregorian Elementary School. 

Teachers and administrators at the school, located just blocks away from Brown University in the city’s Fox Point neighborhood, are working with the University to transform an empty classroom into a hands-on, interactive space where students from kindergarten to fifth grade can explore science, technology, engineering, arts and math — or STEAM for short.

Dedicated spaces for individual and group study. Comfortable, versatile and laptop-friendly furniture. And a refreshed, expanded and diversified collection of books and periodicals.

Kenneth Wong, an education scholar at Brown, will assess whether a longstanding music enrichment program in Pawtucket is helping to close opportunity and education achievement gaps for low-income students of color.

Could an after-school music enrichment program help close opportunity and achievement gaps among K-12 students in Rhode Island? An education scholar at Brown University is partnering with a local school district and orchestra to find out.