This week I challenged my editor to face off against a machine. Barbara Kantrowitz gamely accepted, under one condition: “You have to file early.”  Ever since ChatGPT arrived in 2022, many journalists have made a public stunt out of asking the new generation of artificial intelligence to write their stories. Those AI stories were often bland and sprinkled with errors. I wanted to understand how well ChatGPT handled a different aspect of writing: giving feedback.

My curiosity was piqued by a new study, published in the June 2024 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Learning and Instruction, that evaluated the quality of ChatGPT’s feedback on students’ writing. A team of researchers compared AI with human feedback on 200 history essays written by students in grades 6 through 12 and they determined that human feedback was generally a bit better. Humans had a particular advantage in advising students on something to work on that would be appropriate for where they are in their development as a writer. 

But ChatGPT came close. On a five-point scale that the researchers used to rate feedback quality, with a 5 being the highest quality feedback, ChatGPT averaged a 3.6 compared with a 4.0 average from a team of 16 expert human evaluators. It was a tough challenge. Most of these humans had taught writing for more than 15 years or they had considerable experience in writing instruction. All received three hours of training for this exercise plus extra pay for providing the feedback.

ChatGPT even beat these experts in one aspect; it was slightly better at giving feedback on students’ reasoning, argumentation and use of evidence from source materials – the features that the researchers had wanted the writing evaluators to focus on.

“It was better than I thought it was going to be because I didn’t have a lot of hope that it was going to be that good,” said Steve Graham, a well-regarded expert on writing instruction at Arizona State University, and a member of the study’s research team. “It wasn’t always accurate. But sometimes it was right on the money. And I think we’ll learn how to make it better.”

Average ratings for the quality of ChatGPT and human feedback on 200 student essays

Exactly how ChatGPT is able to give good feedback is something of a black box even to the writing researchers who conducted this study. Artificial intelligence doesn’t comprehend things in the same way that humans do. But somehow, through the neural networks that ChatGPT’s programmers built, it is picking up on patterns from all the writing it has previously digested, and it is able to apply those patterns to a new text. 

The surprising “relatively high quality” of ChatGPT’s feedback is important because it means that the new artificial intelligence of large language models, also known as generative AI, could potentially help students improve their writing. One of the biggest problems in writing instruction in U.S. schools is that teachers assign too little writing, Graham said, often because teachers feel that they don’t have the time to give personalized feedback to each student. That leaves students without sufficient practice to become good writers. In theory, teachers might be willing to assign more writing or insist on revisions for each paper if students (or teachers) could use ChatGPT to provide feedback between drafts. 

Despite the potential, Graham isn’t an enthusiastic cheerleader for AI. “My biggest fear is that it becomes the writer,” he said. He worries that students will not limit their use of ChatGPT to helpful feedback, but ask it to do their thinking, analyzing and writing for them. That’s not good for learning. The research team also worries that writing instruction will suffer if teachers delegate too much feedback to ChatGPT. Seeing students’ incremental progress and common mistakes remain important for deciding what to teach next, the researchers said. For example, seeing loads of run-on sentences in your students’ papers might prompt a lesson on how to break them up. But if you don’t see them, you might not think to teach it. Another common concern among writing instructors is that AI feedback will steer everyone to write in the same homogenized way. A young writer’s unique voice could be flattened out before it even has the chance to develop.

There’s also the risk that students may not be interested in heeding AI feedback. Students often ignore the painstaking feedback that their teachers already give on their essays. Why should we think students will pay attention to feedback if they start getting more of it from a machine? 

Still, Graham and his research colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, are continuing to study how AI could be used effectively and whether it ultimately improves students’ writing. “You can’t ignore it,” said Graham. “We either learn to live with it in useful ways, or we’re going to be very unhappy with it.”

Right now, the researchers are studying how students might converse back-and-forth with ChatGPT like a writing coach in order to understand the feedback and decide which suggestions to use.

Example of feedback from a human and ChatGPT on the same essay

In the current study, the researchers didn’t track whether students understood or employed the feedback, but only sought to measure its quality. Judging the quality of feedback is a rather subjective exercise, just as feedback itself is a bundle of subjective judgment calls. Smart people can disagree on what good writing looks like and how to revise bad writing. 

In this case, the research team came up with its own criteria for what constitutes good feedback on a history essay. They instructed the humans to focus on the student’s reasoning and argumentation, rather than, say, grammar and punctuation.  They also told the human raters to adopt a “glow and grow strategy” for delivering the feedback by first finding something to praise, then identifying a particular area for improvement. 

The human raters provided this kind of feedback on hundreds of history essays from 2021 to 2023, as part of an unrelated study of an initiative to boost writing at school. The researchers randomly grabbed 200 of these essays and fed the raw student writing – without the human feedback – to version 3.5 of ChatGPT and asked it to give feedback, too. 

At first, the AI feedback was terrible, but as the researchers tinkered with the instructions, or the “prompt,” they typed into ChatGPT, the feedback improved. The researchers eventually settled upon this wording: “Pretend you are a secondary school teacher. Provide 2-3 pieces of specific, actionable feedback on each of the following essays…. Use a friendly and encouraging tone.” The researchers also fed the assignment that the students were given, for example, “Why did the Montgomery Bus Boycott succeed?” along with the reading source material that the students were provided. (More details about how the researchers prompted ChatGPT are explained in Appendix C of the study.)

The humans took about 20 to 25 minutes per essay. ChatGPT’s feedback came back instantly. The humans sometimes marked up sentences by, for example, showing a place where the student could have cited a source to buttress an argument. ChatGPT didn’t write any in-line comments and only wrote a note to the student. 

Researchers then read through both sets of feedback – human and machine – for each essay, comparing and rating them. (It was supposed to be a blind comparison test and the feedback raters were not told who authored each one. However, the language and tone of ChatGPT were distinct giveaways, and the in-line comments were a tell of human feedback.)

Humans appeared to have a clear edge with the very strongest and the very weakest writers, the researchers found. They were better at pushing a strong writer a little bit further, for example, by suggesting that the student consider and address a counterargument. ChatGPT struggled to come up with ideas for a student who was already meeting the objectives of a well-argued essay with evidence from the reading source materials. ChatGPT also struggled with the weakest writers. The researchers had to drop two of the essays from the study because they were so short that ChatGPT didn’t have any feedback for the student. The human rater was able to parse out some meaning from a brief, incomplete sentence and offer a suggestion. 

In one student essay about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, reprinted above, the human feedback seemed too generic to me: “Next time, I would love to see some evidence from the sources to help back up your claim.” ChatGPT, by contrast, specifically suggested that the student could have mentioned how much revenue the bus company lost during the boycott – an idea that was mentioned in the student’s essay. ChatGPT also suggested that the student could have mentioned specific actions that the NAACP and other organizations took. But the student had actually mentioned a few of these specific actions in his essay. That part of ChatGPT’s feedback was plainly inaccurate. 

In another student writing example, also reprinted below, the human straightforwardly pointed out that the student had gotten an historical fact wrong. ChatGPT appeared to affirm that the student’s mistaken version of events was correct.

Another example of feedback from a human and ChatGPT on the same essay

So how did ChatGPT’s review of my first draft stack up against my editor’s? One of the researchers on the study team suggested a prompt that I could paste into ChatGPT. After a few back and forth questions with the chatbot about my grade level and intended audience, it initially spit out some generic advice that had little connection to the ideas and words of my story. It seemed more interested in format and presentation, suggesting a summary at the top and subheads to organize the body. One suggestion would have made my piece too long-winded. Its advice to add examples of how AI feedback might be beneficial was something that I had already done. I then asked for specific things to change in my draft, and ChatGPT came back with some great subhead ideas. I plan to use them in my newsletter, which you can see if you sign up for it here. (And if you want to see my prompt and dialogue with ChatGPT, here is the link.) 

My human editor, Barbara, was the clear winner in this round. She tightened up my writing, fixed style errors and helped me brainstorm this ending. Barbara’s job is safe – for now. 

This story about AI feedback was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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In theory, education technology could redesign school from a factory-like assembly line to an individualized experience. Computers, powered by algorithms and AI, could deliver custom-tailored lessons for each child. Advocates call this concept “personalized learning” but this sci-fi idyll (or dystopia, depending on your point of view) has been slow to catch on in American classrooms.

Meanwhile one piece of ed tech, called ASSISTments, takes the opposite approach. Instead of personalizing instruction, this homework website for middle schoolers encourages teachers to assign the exact same set of math problems to the entire class. One size fits all. 

Unlike other popular math practice sites, such as Khan Academy, IXL or ALEKS, in which a computer controls the content, ASSISTments keeps the control levers with the teachers, who pick the questions they like from a library of 200,000. Many teachers assign the same familiar homework questions from textbooks and curricula they are already using.

And this deceptively simple – and free –  tool has built an impressive evidence base and a following among middle school math teachers. Roughly 3,000 teachers and 130,000 students were using it during the 2022-23 school year, according to the husband and wife team of Neil and Cristina Heffernan who run ASSISTments, a nonprofit based at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, where Neil is a computer science professor.

After Neil built the platform in 2003, several early studies showed promising results, and then a large randomized control trial (RCT) in Maine, published in 2016, confirmed them. For 1,600 seventh-grade students whose classrooms were randomly selected to use ASSISTments for math homework, math achievement was significantly higher at the end of the year, equivalent to an extra three quarters of a year of schooling, according to one estimate. Both groups – treatment and control – were otherwise using the same textbooks and curriculum. 

On the strength of those results, an MIT research organization singled out ASSISTments as one of the rare ed tech tools proven to help students. The Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse, which reviews education evidence, said the research behind ASSISTments was so strong that it received the highest stamp of approval: “without reservations.”

Still, Maine is an unusual state with a population that is more than 90 percent white and so small that everyone could fit inside the city limits of San Diego. It had distributed laptops to every middle school student years before the ASSISTments experiment. Would an online math platform work in conditions where computer access is uneven? 

The Department of Education commissioned a $3 million replication study in North Carolina, in which 3,000 seventh graders were randomly assigned to use ASSISTments. The study, set to test how well the students learned math in spring of 2020, was derailed by the pandemic. But a private foundation salvaged it. Before the pandemic, Arnold Ventures had agreed to fund an additional year of the North Carolina study, to see if students would continue to be better at math in eighth grade. (Arnold Ventures is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

Those longer-term results were published in June 2023, and they were good.  Even a year later, on year-end eighth grade math tests, the 3,000 students who had used ASSISTments in seventh grade outperformed 3,000 peers who hadn’t. The eighth graders had moved on to new math topics and were no longer using ASSISTments, but their practice time on the platform a year earlier was still generating dividends. 

Researchers found that the lingering effect of practicing math on ASSISTments was similar in size to the long-term benefits of Saga Education’s intensive, in-person tutoring, which costs $3,200 to $4,800 per year for each student. The cost of ASSISTments is a tiny fraction of that, less than $100 per student. (That cost is covered by private foundations and federal grants. Schools use it free of charge.)

Another surprising result is that students, on average, benefited from solving the same problems, without assigning easier ones to weaker students and harder ones to stronger students. 

How is it that this rather simple piece of software is succeeding while more sophisticated ed tech has often shown mixed results and failed to gain traction?

The studies aren’t able to explain that exactly. ASSISTments, criticized for its “bland” design and for sometimes being “frustrating,” doesn’t appear to be luring kids to do enormous amounts of homework. In North Carolina, students typically used it for only 18 minutes a week, usually split among two to three sessions. 

From a student’s perspective, the main feature is instant feedback. ASSISTments marks each problem immediately, like a robo grader. A green check appears for getting it right on the first try, and an orange check is for solving it on a subsequent attempt. Students can try as many times as they wish. Students can also just ask for the correct answer. 

Nearly every online math platform gives instant feedback. It’s a well established principle of cognitive science that students learn better when they can see and sort out their mistakes immediately, rather than waiting days for the teacher to grade their work and return it. 

The secret sauce might be in the easy-to-digest feedback that teachers are getting. Teachers receive a simple data report, showing them which problems students are getting right and wrong. 

ASSISTments encourages teachers to project anonymized homework results on a whiteboard and review the ones that many students got wrong. Not every teacher does that. On the teacher’s back end, the system also highlights common mistakes that students are making. In surveys, teachers said it changes how they review homework.

Other math platforms generate data reports too, and teachers ought to be able to use them to inform their instruction. But when 30 students are each working on 20 different, customized problems, it’s a lot harder to figure out which of those 600 problems should be reviewed in class. 

There are other advantages to having a class work on a common set of problems. It allows kids to work together, something that motivates many extroverted tweens and teens to do their homework. It can also trigger worthwhile class discussions, in which students explain how they solved the same problem differently.

ASSISTments has drawbacks. Many students don’t have good internet connections at home and many teachers don’t want to devote precious minutes of class time to screen time. In the North Carolina study, some teachers had students do the homework in school. 

Teachers are restricted to the math problems that Heffernan’s team has uploaded to the ASSISTments library. It currently includes problems from three middle school math curricula:  Illustrative Mathematics, Open Up Resources and Eureka Math (also known as EngageNY). For the Maine and North Carolina studies, the ASSISTments team uploaded math questions that teachers were familiar with from their textbooks and binders. But outside of a study, if teachers want to use their own math questions, they’ll have to wait until next year, when ASSISTments plans to allow teachers to build their own problems or edit existing ones.

Teachers can assign longer open-response questions, but ASSISTments doesn’t give instant feedback on them. Heffernan is currently testing how to use AI to evaluate students’ written explanations. 

There are other bells and whistles inside the ASSISTments system too. Many problems have “hints” to help students who are struggling and can show step-by-step worked out examples. There are also optional “skill builders” for students to practice rudimentary skills, such as adding fractions with unlike denominators.  It is unclear how important these extra features are. In the North Carolina study, students generally didn’t use them.

There’s every reason to believe that students can learn more from personalized instruction, but the research is mixed. Many students don’t spend as much practice time on the software as they should. Many teachers want more control over what the computer assigns to students. Researchers are starting to see good results in using differentiated practice work in combination with tutoring. That could make catching up a lot more cost effective.

I rarely hear about “personalized learning” any more in a classroom context. One thing we’ve all learned during the pandemic is that learning has proven to be a profoundly human interaction of give and take between student and teacher and among peers. One-size-fits-all instruction may not be perfect, but it keeps the humans in the picture. 

This story about ASSISTments was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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Many major cities around the country, from New York and New Orleans to Denver and Los Angeles, have changed how children are assigned to public schools over the past 20 years and now allow families to send their children to a school outside of their neighborhood zone. Known as public school choice or open enrollment, this policy gives children in poor neighborhoods a chance at a better education. Many supporters hoped it could also be a way to desegregate schools even as residential neighborhoods remain racially divided.

However, a new study of public school choice in Charlotte, North Carolina, finds a deeply troubling consequence to this well-intended policy: increased crime. 

Three university economists studied the criminal justice records of 10,000 boys who were in fifth grade between 2005 and 2008. Thousands wanted to go to highly regarded middle schools, some of which were in nearby suburbs of the large Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district. Seats were allocated through a lottery.

The lucky ones, who won a seat to their first choice middle school, were less likely to be arrested or end up in prison between the ages of 16 and 22.  But the students left behind in a neighborhood school were much more likely to be arrested or imprisoned as adults. The increase in criminal activity among the 8,000 boys who hadn’t participated in the school lottery was greater than the decrease in criminal activity for the lottery winners. Public school choice ended up increasing overall arrests and days incarcerated for young men, the researchers concluded in a draft paper, “Does School Choice Increase Crime?” circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research in February 2023.

The reason, according to the researchers, is that the boys left behind were surrounded by a less desirable mix of peers. Families who placed a high value on education were more likely to enter a lottery for a well-regarded school, win it and leave the neighborhood school. In Charlotte, these kids were predominantly Black and had higher test scores. From sixth grade onward, these higher achieving kids were no longer interacting socially with the neighborhood kids all day long. Crime itself is a social activity, according to the researchers’ previous studies, and kids are more likely to commit crimes with other kids who live nearby and especially those who attend the same schools. With fewer positive influences at school, kids who might not otherwise have participated in crime were more likely to join in.

“There are many important studies that have documented important, positive effects of school choice,” said Stephen Ross, an economist at the University of Connecticut and one of the three authors. “But our paper says that one should be at least somewhat more careful prior to jumping on the school choice bandwagon because there are also significant costs that might offset the benefits.”

I know, I know. Many of you reading this have questions about the study design. So did I. Let me walk you through it.

It’s impossible to know exactly how much crime people would have committed in adulthood had there been no school choice.  But the researchers were able to estimate the influence of the school lottery policy by looking at three separate years of fifth graders in each neighborhood. These are tiny sub-neighborhoods, sometimes just a few blocks in area. The researchers tracked how future criminal activity fluctuated depending upon how many of their peers left for lottery schools. In years when more peers left for lottery schools, the adult crime figures for the children left behind increased. The following year, if fewer peers left for lottery schools, subsequent crime figures fell back again.

Researchers found that it was students they had categorized as “low risk” of getting arrested who were drawn into crime after peers left for lottery schools. The increase in criminal behavior was detected among white children and children with higher test scores. These boys racked up more arrests and days behind bars when more of their elementary school classmates left. Kids at “high risk” of arrest were less affected. Their criminal activity later in adulthood was more stable regardless of how many peers left for lottery schools.

Here are some examples from the study. On average, 44 boys among 1,000 who did not participate in the lottery lost a school peer in their neighborhood to a school lottery. That seemingly small exposure to lottery winners was associated with a 25 percent increase in arrests from an average of 55 arrests to 69 arrests among the boys who were less likely to get arrested. Most children were never arrested in their young adulthood, but the 14 extra arrests among this group of 500 boys are significant.  Most of the low-risk children were never incarcerated, but the total days in prison among 500 of them jumped from 600 days to 1,000 days behind bars.

The researchers only looked at how public school lotteries affected criminal activity. By the same logic, however, it’s reasonable to think that charter schools and private school vouchers could trigger worrisome crime increases if they siphon away the best students from the local, neighborhood schools. But that hasn’t been proven.

This isn’t the first study to notice unintended consequences from open enrollment policies. A 2018 report by The Center for New York City Affairs at The New School pointed out the “Paradox of Choice.” In New York, the siphoning off of students also siphoned the funds that schools receive. Less desirable local neighborhood schools were left with fewer resources and deteriorated even more. Also unexpected was how schools had become even more segregated. Sought-after schools had become extremely selective in choosing students with the highest grades and test scores. Fewer Black and Hispanic students were being admitted.

Charlotte introduced public school choice a few years after busing ended in 2001. It was a well intended effort to prevent schools from resegregating along racial lines, and to give children a better shot at a quality education. But this study shows that there are unexpected connections between schools and communities. A good solution for one problem can sometimes create a whole new one. 

This story about the effects of a school lottery was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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What do we know about how kids are catching up at school as the pandemic drags on? The good news, according to the latest achievement data, is that learning resumed at a more typical pace during the 2021-22 school year that just ended. Despite the Delta and Omicron waves that sent many students and teachers into quarantine and disrupted school, children’s math and reading abilities generally improved as much as they had in years before the pandemic.

“The big picture takeaway is that learning mirrors pre-pandemic trends,” said Karyn Lewis, a researcher at NWEA, which sells assessments to schools to track student progress. Lewis analyzed how student achievement improved between fall and spring assessments, called Measures of Academic Progress or MAP, taken by eight million elementary and middle school children across the country. “In some cases, the growth is a little bit more than a typical year, maybe a 6 percent increase. It’s very small.”

Because of these small increases in the rate of learning, some students were able to make up as much as a quarter or a third of the so-called learning loss that they suffered during the school closures and remote instruction of 2020 and 2021. But even with those gains, student achievement still lags far behind what children at each grade level used to demonstrate before the pandemic.

“If improvements continue at the rate we saw this year, the timeline for a full recovery is years away and will likely extend past the availability of federal recovery funds,” NWEA wrote in a press release accompanying a learning loss report released on July 19, 2022. Depending upon the student’s grade and subject, NWEA estimated recovery to be as short as one or two years but surpassing five years in some cases.

Slow recovery: Reading and math scores stabilize and begin to recover for many students. Math scores continue to drop for middle schoolers

A good analogy is a cross-country road trip. Imagine that students were traveling at 55 miles an hour, ran out of gas and started walking instead. Now they’re back in their cars and humming along at 55 miles an hour again. Some are traveling at 60 miles an hour, but they’re still far away from the destination they would have arrived at if they hadn’t run out of gas. It’s this distance from the destination that educators are describing when they talk about learning loss. 

One group of economists studied NWEA’s achievement data at the peak of learning loss in the spring of 2021 and estimated that fourth and fifth graders had fallen eight to 10 weeks behind in reading and math, respectively. Based on the subsequent catch up that NWEA documented in the spring of 2022, upper elementary school students might now be six to seven weeks behind. 

However, some groups of students, especially middle schoolers, didn’t make such good progress. Students who completed eighth grade in the spring of 2022 fell 18 percent further behind in math compared to 2021. This suggests their math learning losses might have expanded from 19 weeks to 23 weeks – almost six months behind – as they start high school in the fall. Seventh graders also made no forward catch-up progress in math. 

“Middle schoolers are where we see the most stagnation,” said Lewis. “It is certainly concerning. Those are the kids with the longest roadmap to catch up.”

Getting kids back on track academically is arguably one of the most important challenges our nation faces right now. The long-term economic and social costs are enormous if we fail. One group estimated that the U.S. economy could lose more than $128 billion a year, another worried that today’s generation of students risks losing $2 trillion in lifetime earnings.

This report doesn’t address why or how some students bounced back while others fell further. Eighth graders were in sixth grade when the pandemic first hit in the spring of 2020 and their mental health might have been more affected by pandemic isolation. At the same time, the material that students need to learn in middle school is more complex and the rate of learning slows.

Third graders posted more sluggish progress in reading than fourth and fifth graders. These third graders were in first grade when the pandemic hit in 2020 and were just learning to read. Based on their rate of progress, NWEA estimates that it will take more than five years to catch up. Third graders were the youngest students analyzed in this NWEA report, which tracked only children who were already enrolled in school before the pandemic hit in order to measure learning losses. We don’t know from this report if even younger children are suffering more.

Low-income students appeared to make as much achievement progress as higher income students. For example, fifth graders in high-poverty schools and low-poverty schools alike both improved by nine points on math tests. But low-income children, who were already behind before the pandemic, lost the most ground and their achievement gaps with higher income children are still gigantic. 

“Students in low-poverty schools will likely recover faster as they have less ground to make up,” NWEA researchers wrote in their brief. 

We also cannot tell from this report which catch-up interventions, such as tutoring and summer school, led to better learning progress. NWEA is working with outside researchers and is slated to issue its first report later this year. Perhaps those reports can help shed light on the best ways to help children who are behind catch up – whether there’s a pandemic or not.

This story about learning loss was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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How well does online tutoring work? 

This is an important question. The federal government is pushing schools to spend a big chunk of their $122 billion in federal American Rescue Plan funds on tutoring, but bringing in armies of tutors into school buildings is a logistical nightmare. And now, with the Omicron variant still raging in many states, it’s even more difficult.  It’s also hard to find enough physical space to work one-on-one or to rejigger school schedules to make room for tutoring time.

Online tutoring is a tempting solution. It comes in many forms, from text chatting and homework help lines to robo-tutors that use artificial intelligence to deliver prepackaged lessons. Some forms of online tutoring mimic in-person tutoring except sessions take place over Zoom or another video chatting app. All a student needs is a laptop, headphones and a good internet connection to access a one-on-one tutoring session, even in a crowded classroom.

The online tutoring business is indeed booming. Hayley Spira-Bauer, chief academic officer at Jericho, N.Y.-based iTutor, told me they’re in a “hyper growth phase.” Heavyweight investors, including Softbank and IVP, are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into online tutoring startups, including Vienna-based GoStudent and Montreal-based Paper. 

While there’s strong evidence for a particular type of in-person tutoring that takes place every or almost every day called “high dosage” tutoring, it’s still not clear that this success translates to the virtual world. 

So far, we have two well-designed studies where students were randomly assigned to receive online tutoring and their academic progress was measured. The first showed promising results for low-income immigrant middle schoolers in Italy in the spring of 2020. When it was repeated during the 2020-21 school year, it again showed that students’ test scores shot up when they received four hours of online tutoring a week from university students. But when students received only two hours a week of online tutoring, the academic gains fell by more than half. 

“This suggests that high-dosage tutoring is very effective, but when we decrease the number of hours, the impact gets significantly reduced.” said Eliana La Ferrara, a professor of economics at Bocconi University and a researcher in the study with whom I corresponded by email. 

The results were less sanguine in another study that looked at pairing volunteer college students with low-income middle schoolers in the Chicago area. The students who received online tutoring in the spring of 2021 didn’t do much better in reading or math than students who didn’t get the tutoring. Statistically, it was a null result. The study, Online Tutoring by College Volunteers: Experimental Evidence from a Pilot Program, is slated to be published in a forthcoming issue of the American Economic Review, and was recently made public at the end of January 2022.

“We haven’t proven that online tutoring is guaranteed to work,” said Matthew Kraft, an economist at Brown University who led the Chicago study. “But we haven’t gotten evidence to say this is really going to tank. It was a pilot study and it wasn’t particularly large. It would motivate me to want to study this a little bit more, particularly at scale.”

For the Chicago study, CovEd, a non-profit organization run by college volunteers, recruited undergraduate college students from highly selective universities around the country to work with middle school students in Chicago Heights, an industrial suburb 20 miles south of Chicago. Over the course of 12 weeks, more than 250 middle school students – mostly low-income children of color – were supposed to receive 30 minute tutoring sessions twice a week during the school day. In practice, the students received much less, an average of three hours in total. Technical glitches, poor attendance, rolling tutor recruitment and vacation breaks ate away at tutoring time.

It’s unclear whether it was the lower frequency or the awkwardness of remote learning that inhibited the kind of learning gains that are usually seen from tutoring. Kraft noticed that students who started the tutoring earlier because their tutors were recruited in the first waves tended to see larger academic gains. That indicates to him that online tutoring could work if students received more hours. 

The unpaid volunteer tutors were encouraged to focus on building personal relationships with their students and then give supplemental help with math and reading. 

I talked with Isabella Pedron, a 20-year-old chemical engineering major and pre-med student at Texas A&M University, who was part of the pilot study and continues to serve as a volunteer online tutor to middle school students in Chicago Heights. 

“I really love children,” said Pedron, who signed up after seeing a Texas A&M email about volunteer opportunities during the pandemic. “In the future I want to be a pediatrician. So I thought this would be a great way to not only interact with children, but also to give guidance to underserved kids in the United States.”

Pedron told me it was her first time tutoring or mentoring anybody and she appreciated the two-hour online training session, which gave her tips on how to talk to children and what to do when a student doesn’t respond.

Pedron conducted the tutoring sessions over Zoom from her dorm room in College Station, Texas. One of her students never showed up. The other didn’t log on for the first two weeks. Once he did, Pedron said she had a “blast” with her tutee, who had a passion for robotics. Pedron created Kahoot and Quizlet games to play and gave her tutee a virtual tour of the Texas A&M campus and her dorm room. “They were really really attentive whenever I was explaining any topics. And they were always very kind, saying thank you for all the sessions. I always felt like we had a great time during our mentoring sessions,” she said. 

But it didn’t surprise Pedron to learn that the students’ test scores didn’t improve much. Often the 30-minute session shrank to 20 minutes once the students logged on to their devices. “You don’t get a lot done in 15 or 20 minutes,” she said. 

Sometimes other tutors didn’t show up and once she subbed in for them. Their tutees didn’t have their cameras on and it was hard to establish a rapport. 

Pedron said that more frequent sessions throughout the week would have helped the students more, but it would be difficult for many college volunteers to devote more than an hour a week with their school schedules.

She also wished she knew more about what the students were working on at school. “Some tutoring sessions were like, ‘Oh, I finished all my homework. We don’t have any exams. I don’t need to work on anything.’  So we played some other trivia games online, but they weren’t really geared towards what they were actually learning,” Pedron said.

And Pedron admitted that it was sometimes hard to engage students across the computer screen. At times her tutees would look away from the computer for long stretches of time and seem distracted. “I would ask them if they wanted to switch things up and do something different,” said Pedron. “It’s easier to lose focus and attention on Zoom.”

The researchers are hopeful that online tutoring could be more potent if they can increase attendance. The problem they’re now facing is finding tutors.

“We have found it considerably more challenging to recruit college volunteers this year than last year,” said Kraft, explaining that college students are busier now than they were during the first year of the pandemic, when they themselves were attending classes remotely. Kraft is investigating whether high school students could serve as online tutors. 

Paying tutors might help too. “In our experience more recently, it seems unlikely that volunteers alone would be a primary source of tutors,” Kraft said.

I asked Kraft how online tutoring companies are claiming such big academic benefits in their marketing materials. iTutor, for example, wrote an impact case study, saying that Alaska students, who were a year and a half behind, had accelerated “growth up to grade level rapidly,” a much larger jump than either the Italy or Chicago studies imply. 

“Trust but verify,” said Kraft. “It’s probably true that some kids make huge gains. Whether all kids did is maybe a different question, and not the one that they’re trying to convince you they answered. I think there’s a lot of potential for online tutoring, but this speaks to the need for third-party rigorous empirical evaluation.”

This story about online tutoring was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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To understand the pandemic’s impact on middle schoolers, picture the pain of lunchtime. A bunch of uncomfortable adolescents are navigating social distancing rules while figuring out when and if to take down their masks. It’s not going well.

Some have given up eating lunch entirely, which worries Phyllis Fagell, a school counselor and author of the book Middle School Matters. She knows this age group. And she knows all this anxiety is not just about masks.

It’s everything.

“They feel really self-conscious and vulnerable,” said Fagell, who has observed a spike in eating disorders since students returned full-time this fall — one of many reentry issues educators are concerned about.

If being isolated at home last year was tough, it turns out being back full-time is also filled with challenges for our eye-rolling, head-shaking, serial-texting middle schoolers, who are enduring a time of life I once deemed “the age of embarrassment.” 

The pandemic left many of them behind, both academically and socially, at a most unfortunate phase: an awkward time when they are separating from parents and figuring out who they are and want to be. Their bodies and voices may feel as unfamiliar as their friend groups, after so much time apart or under strict pandemic limitations.

Related: How four middle schoolers are getting through the pandemic

Middle schoolers, studies confirm, are experiencing more trauma and mental health issues than ever before — something I heard plenty about during a recent virtual conference of the world’s largest association of middle school educators, at a time when major pediatric groups say the state of children’s mental health should be considered a national emergency.

“We should spend more time listening to them, and asking them [middle-schoolers] for insights,” said Lisa Harrison, an associate professor of teacher education at Ohio University, who spoke on a panel about what a successful middle school of the future might look like. “They are spot on with so many levels of what we should be doing.”

Many of the panelists underscored what The Hechinger Report has observed after many months of reporting on this age group: There’s a lot of work ahead to figure out how to help middle schoolers heal, and their voices must be part of the discussion.

“Between 11 and 14 is when young men really start shaping who they are. Middle school years are tough years. Kids are lonely. They are letting technology raise them…there are a lot of our young people in pain.”

 Robert Jackson, education consultant

Students who spoke during the conference had plenty to say. They asked for more course choices, including classes in engineering, coding and additional languages like Arabic. They want a warm, welcoming environment, a space so safe and cozy they don’t want to leave. One wanted evidence that Black and Hispanic lives matter, another wanted more life lessons and career training. Another said they do not appreciate being yelled at.

Middle school should be a place where “we can talk about struggles at home like depression and anxiety,” said Sudikshya Dhaurali a 13-year-old student at Western Middle School for the Arts in Louisville, Kentucky.

Several emphasized what became a main conference theme: They want relationships with adults they trust.

Here’s proof of how mixed up middle schoolers are: As students came back to their school buildings this year, more were acting out; some principals discovered acts of vandalism like ripping up soap dispensers, said Joseph Mazza, principal of Seven Bridges Middle School in suburban Westchester County, New York.

And even though his school’s sports and clubs are back in action and students have been able to eat lunch outside — the school’s PTA bought picnic tables for outdoor dining — personal losses and general anxiety related to the pandemic keeps school from feeling back to normal. With the virus still circulating, a student who has been exposed, on any given day, may be sent home.

Related: Middle school is difficult. Try experiencing it under quarantine

Amid such confusion and uncertainty, opportunities for leadership for this age group have become particularly important, said Mazza, who along with Fagell hosts a podcast on middle schoolers. These kids want “activities that put them in the driver’s seat,” he said, along with time to speak about what’s on their minds.

I reached out to other educators in search of solutions and heard many that made enormous sense, such as small advisory group meetings, and rooms staffed with counselors where students can come in, get a glass of water, chat with an adult or simply draw and paint.

Casey Siddons, the assistant principal at Cabin John Middle School in Potomac, Maryland, said the school has added morning mindfulness sessions, a space where students can practice breathing for 15 minutes and talk to a counselor who is leading sessions. “The staff has been really attuned to the fact that there is a lot of emotional support needed,” Siddons told me.

 Middle school should be a place where “we can talk about struggles at home like depression and anxiety.”

Sudikshya Dhaurali a 13-year-old student at Western Middle School for the Arts in Louisville, Kentucky.

Schoolwide lessons on topics like bullying and identity have helped students; Fagell and other educators shared tips — from establishing comforting routines to dressing up alongside students for spirit week and playing funny music or YouTube videos during that fraught and uncomfortable lunch hour.

Sage Smith, a middle school teacher and motivational speaker in Cleveland, Tennessee, also urged middle-school teachers to take care of themselves, so they “can fully be there” for students, and help them “create a world where they can feel some peace.”

That means also being aware of the toll the pandemic has taken on them, as well as their students. “I have come to realize that if great teachers are going to stay in their classrooms, they need support,” Smith said.

Others noted the need to pay particular attention to students of color, in particular Black and Hispanic boys. They are often unfairly stigmatized and remain the most misunderstood, suspended and expelled of all K-12 students, said Robert Jackson, a national education consultant and speaker. He urged educators to recognize how these groups are affected by both historical injustices and more recent traumatic events like the killing of George Floyd and other Black men in police custody.

“We can’t be scared to talk about things that matter if we are working with this population of young men,” Jackson said. “Between 11 and 14 is when young men really start shaping who they are. Middle school years are tough years. Kids are lonely. There are a lot of our young people in pain.”

A few panelists spoke of the success they are having exposing their students to career opportunities, noting that it has given them more self-confidence navigating both the uncertainty of the pandemic along with the ups and downs of growing up. Getting to know passions and interests of students is one way of helping them plan their future and close equity gaps, said Julie DiPilato, a sixth-grade teacher at Barnstable Intermediate School on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

Related: Middle school minds: figuring out who you are in the midst of covid

Listening to all that middle school pain reminded me why U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is urging educators to “go beyond literacy, math, history, science, and other core subjects to include helping students to build the social, emotional, and behavioral skills” that will help them recover from the pandemic.

He would likely hear no argument from Tyrese Hutchinson, a seventh grader at Plantation Middle School in Florida. The pandemic was a hard time, he recalled: “First you had Covid where you had to be quarantined and then a lot of people were losing their jobs and couldn’t feed their families.” Last year, Hutchinson participated in a leadership project to feed the homeless. And now that all his classmates are back in class, he said he wants middle schoolers to also learn about jobs and insurance and other life lessons beyond academics.

“I would make the school more welcoming, make kids want to go to school and say, ‘That’s my favorite school,’ ” Hutchinson said.

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Pandemic closures prompted hundreds of museums, art galleries and zoos around the world to launch virtual field trips in the last year. Online “trips” let kids peek in on polar bears in the Antarctic, walk through exhibits in natural history museums, or visit art collections in Paris — and helped teachers give students a break from the monotony of remote learning.

Most of these virtual field trips were like their in-person predecessors — a fun, if educational, break from class, not necessarily connected to the learning standards kids are expected to meet by the end of each grade.

But a program offered through a museum in Utah sought to offer a different kind of virtual science field trip.

With their research assistant notebooks in hand, students could virtually conduct in-depth science investigations on archaeological field sites for the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU), study changes happening in the Uinta Mountains, and examine real dinosaur fossils from the world-renowned Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry.

The program, called Research Quest, was designed for middle school students. It uses digitized objects from the museum’s collections and the real-world research and investigations of scientists and educators who work at the NHMU, said Madlyn Larson, director of education initiatives at the NHMU. Through a video, students meet with the Museum’s archaeologist Glenna Nielsen-Grimm; Mitch Power, professor and curator of the Garrett Herbarium; paleontologist Carrie Levitt-Bussian; and they engage in live talks with special guests, like astronaut Scott Kelly.

“Research Quest was kind of envisioned as this bridge that could give teachers and students a way into authentic science investigations, using real data and real objects,” said Larson.

The curators and collection managers here are actively conducting research on things likely to get kids interested, from dinosaur bones to climate change, said Jim Breitinger, the senior manager of marketing at the museum. Bringing that work to life in the classroom is “at the heart of Research Quest,” he said.

Teachers can create an account on Research Quest and select investigations appropriate for their grade level. The series of activities within each investigation are designed to take up to two to three class periods.

Each investigation forces students to analyze data, gather evidence, conduct science experiments and have discussions like real-world scientists — guided by the people who work at the museum.

“They see that this is a real place,” said Larson. “There’s this real scientist who studies this and she’s giving them some direction. Her videos are used to provide background information, a connection to a real world scientist, she models thinking and she provides some direction for the students.”

The program, Larson said, gives “learners more autonomy” so that “teachers are less of facilitators of activities in the classroom and more of evaluators of learning in their classroom.”

“If the students are busy with the investigation, which has got scientist-led videos and interactives and notebooks, it’s all turnkey,” Larson added.

The program, launched in 2013, isn’t new. It was designed in partnership with the Utah Education Network, and each of the investigations are aligned to meet Utah’s English language arts and Science with Engineering Education curriculum standards. Lessons meet Common Core and Next Generation Science standards, according to Larson.

Over the past several years, interest in the program, which is free to schools, has grown. During the pandemic the program saw users logging in from across the U.S. and world, Larson said; nationally, it is now being used by more than 500 teachers. The team said they are expanding, thanks to grants from the National Science Foundation and others, and are planning to partner with other natural history museums across the country.

This story about virtual field trips was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter

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It seems intuitive that what children need now is more time. Because students missed so much instruction during the pandemic, teachers should get extra time to fill all those instructional holes, from teaching mathematical percents and zoological classifications to discussing literary metaphors and American history. 

Indeed, many advocacy groups, including the Learning Policy Institute and Ed Trust, are recommending extending learning time next year. I haven’t heard about many school districts announcing longer schedules yet but I was curious to learn what research evidence shows for students at schools that have extended the day or lengthened the year. (I’m excluding optional after-school programs here.) I was surprised by how few well-designed studies there are and how uncertain the benefits have been. 

”We don’t really know what the effects are,” said Jean B. Grossman, an economist at Princeton University and MDRC, a nonprofit research organization, who has studied this research literature. “My takeaway is that extending the learning year doesn’t really work. Just adding 10 extra days doesn’t seem to have any effect.”

Even advocates of longer school days and years emphasize that extra time by itself often doesn’t have an impact. What you do with the time matters. Devoting the extra time to a daily dose of tutoring seems most promising. But tutoring can work equally well even when the school day isn’t lengthened. Extra time does mean that other activities — from physical education to art and coding — don’t have to be curtailed. Another approach that warrants further study is using the extra time for a double dose of math, in which students take a remedial class and a grade-level class concurrently. That’s worked well in Chicago high schools but not in Miami middle schools. What is clear is that using the extra time for just more hours or more days of traditional instruction doesn’t appear to achieve much.

Lengthening the school day or year isn’t a new idea. The 1983 report A Nation at Risk highlighted how much more instructional time children received in other industrialized nations. Japan had 240 school days and Europe averaged between 190 and 210 days, well above the U.S. average of 180 days. Former President Barack Obama called for increasing learning time and his administration gave almost 1,800 low-performing schools extra money, called School Improvement Grants, to help pay for it. Most chose to lengthen the school day, generally by an hour, above the national average of six and a half hours. But the extra time was coupled with other school reforms, such as teacher evaluations, and it was generally impossible to tell how much the extra time alone was making a difference. 

One of the strongest arguments for longer school days is the record of some high performing charter schools. Rigorous studies have shown impressive academic performance in Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools, where students attend school from 7:30 a.m. until 5:00 p.m.. But researchers have been unable to disentangle the extra hours from all the other things that KIPP is doing, from its curriculum to its strict rules, to determine if the longer day is a key to its success. 

One 2012 review of studies on learning time found that the extra time often didn’t produce academic benefits for students and when it did, the benefits were small. “The findings in the literature indicate that simply adding time is insufficient,” the authors at Child Trends, a nonprofit organization, concluded. (The Wallace Foundation, which is among the funders of The Hechinger Report, commissioned this research review.)

The 38 studies in the review that focused on longer days or longer years sometimes found an academic gain for just one group of students, for example, third graders, or for just one subject. One study found higher achievement in science. One didn’t. However, when academic benefits were found, the researchers noticed that low-income and low-achieving students were more likely to reap them.

Sometimes the benefits of extra time are short lived. A full day of kindergarten led to much higher literacy and math skills during the kindergarten year, compared with a half day of kindergarten. But no study found long-term benefits for a full day of kindergarten that lasted beyond first grade. 

Thanks to the Obama administration’s investment in extended learning time, there have been more recent studies. One was a five-year evaluation of a middle school program called Citizen Schools, in which the school day was extended to 6 p.m. Some of the extra time was used for an hour of homework help with volunteer tutors but there wasn’t a structured daily tutoring program. The program was studied in 27 schools in seven states between 2010 and 2015.

Academically, the extended day seemed to be a bust. There were no overall academic benefits in reading or math, on average. (There were some small benefits in math during the first year of implementation and for seventh graders.) 

Another five-year study of adding 300 hours to the school year in 26 Massachusetts schools indicated another bust. The schools used the extra time to increase English class to an hour and 45 minutes each day, for example, but students didn’t score higher on state reading or math tests afterward than students at comparison schools with a shorter school day. The one detectable academic benefit was higher science scores for fifth graders (but not for eighth graders).

The extra hours and days were costly, with schools not only having to pay teachers more but also coping with higher electricity bills from extra hours of running air conditioning. Longer days also cut into after-school sports and other activities, which are important for students’ well-being and motivation.

Snow days add another confounding factor to this research on learning time.  When students miss a lot of school because of snowfall, academic achievement suffers, particularly among low-income students. But that doesn’t mean that the opposite, adding days, boosts achievement. One theory is that lesson plans are built around the current 180-day, six-plus hour schedule. If you lose a day of carefully planned lessons, that’s losing a key building block. But as you add days, or hours, they’re not as well planned and utilized.

Researchers need to get a better handle on the amount of extra learning time needed to make a difference. Perhaps five minutes of extra time a day won’t do much but two hours might. Three hours could be too exhausting and counterproductive. Same with days. Adding five days might be worthless but 30 days could really help a student catch up. 

We need to nail down these numbers and produce better evidence if we want parental support for such a big change to daily and yearly schedules. 

This story about learning time was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletters.

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Before the pandemic, eighth graders’ reading comprehension declined substantially. Since then, scholars have been trying to figure out why their scores dropped so much between 2017 and 2019 on a highly regarded national test known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP. 

Researchers at the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research organization, are digging into whether kids are reading less — perhaps distracted by their digital devices. The emerging answer is that yes, young teens seem to be reading less and enjoying reading less. But the decline in book reading might not be the main culprit in our national comprehension problem. And separate international studies of 15-year-olds and fourth graders indicate that eighth grade reading habits aren’t telling the whole story.

First, the numbers. In survey questions that accompany the NAEP test, eighth graders reported how much time they spent reading outside of school. The percentage of public school students who said they read 30 minutes or more a day, besides homework, declined by 4 percentage points from 53 percent in 2017 to 49 percent in 2019. These same young teens were also less likely to say they talked about books or went to the library. Positive attitudes about reading fell too. Eighth grade students were less likely to agree that reading was one of their favorite activities or that they enjoyed going to a bookstore.

At first, the declines in reading habits and attitudes seemed to fit together with the decline in reading scores and tell a simple story: those who read more scored higher. But when the researchers broke the data down by state, the neat correlation between reading and comprehension fell apart. There were some states, such as Mississippi, where students read less but scores didn’t drop. And in other states, such as Rhode Island, reading habits were more stable, but scores slid nonetheless. 

“It’s perplexing,” said Elena Forzani, an assistant professor of education at Boston University, in reaction to this reading data, which is still unpublished but was presented at two education conferences in April 2021. “We know that reading motivation causes kids to pick up books and read more. And the more and more you read, the better you get at it.”

Forzani, a reading specialist who was not involved in this analysis, wonders if current survey questions are out of step with our digital age and fail to capture all the new kinds of reading that young teens are doing every day. Perhaps reading posts on social media and clicking on article links in Google searches are useful types of reading too. Students might be learning new words and information and thinking critically about texts, boosting their comprehension skills in the same way that old-fashioned book reading does.

“If a kid just wants to sit and watch videos all the time, I wouldn’t want my kids doing that either,” Forzani said. “It’s a passive activity. But if they’re creating their own videos, that’s much more active and requires complex and critical cognitive processes. And I think that’s what matters more.”

Forzani said reading is “hugely important.” Her advice to parents is to allow kids to read whatever they want to, even if it’s “Captain Underpants” and you would rather an older child choose a more challenging book. “It’s always been the case that we want to let kids read whatever motivates them,” Forzani said, “because if they’re not motivated to read, nothing else is going to work.” 

Forzani thinks the slide in eighth grade test scores could be the result of the way that schools teach reading to struggling students. “We tend to take those kids and throw lower level instruction at them,” she said. “They get these rote phonics programs. It’s all focused on learning to read. They’re not having complex discussions about a text. At the same time, we’re also taking away science and history instruction where kids can develop knowledge and where they can put comprehension strategies into practice. We’re teaching kids to read in a content and motivational vacuum.” 

Forzani’s theory for why reading comprehension is deteriorating is compelling, especially since the steepest falls were among low-achieving students but it still needs to be backed up by research

The striking decline in students’ reading habits may be a relatively recent phenomenon in the United States. International data from prior years doesn’t reveal that American students are less enthusiastic about reading. 

Martin Hooper, a senior researcher at the American Institutes for Research who led the eighth grade reading study, has also been digging into reading habits around the world and he’s found an even earlier decrease in reading and reading attitudes in other countries. Between 2000 and 2018, fewer 15-year-olds reported reading for enjoyment in 31 out of 39 countries and jurisdictions surveyed by the Program in International Student Assessment (PISA), which also released its own report on reading habits in the digital age on May 4, 2021. The  U.S. was one of the few exceptions, bucking the disappointing trend here. 

American fourth graders also didn’t show the same antipathy toward reading that their international counterparts did in surveys by the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). Elsewhere around the world fourth graders had more negative attitudes about reading in 2016 than fourth graders did in 2001 in 13 out of 20 countries and jurisdictions. In this survey of elementary school children, parents had even more negative attitudes toward reading than their children. Parents reported reading less for enjoyment in 15 out of 18 countries and jurisdictions. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” said Hooper.

We’re all struggling.

This story about the decline in reading was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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The physical and mental health benefits of getting a good night’s sleep are indisputable. What’s less clear is whether starting school later in the morning will prompt kids to sleep more and consequently learn more during the school day. Fewer studies have looked at academic achievement after a later morning bell. Some have found improved student performance. Some haven’t. 

A new study in Minnesota documents what happened to 18,000 students in grades 5 through 11 after four school districts postponed the start of the school day by 20 to 65 minutes. Student grades increased a little, raising students’ grade point averages by an extra 0.1 points, on average. That’s the equivalent of moving from, say, a B average of a 3.1 to a B average of a 3.2.  

Despite concerns that kids would just stay up later at night if school started later in the morning, many students reported sleeping more. After the switch in start times, students were 16 percent more likely to meet the recommended hours of sleep, which is nine or more hours for students in grades 5 and 8 and at least eight hours for students in grades 9 and 11.

Researchers from the University of Minnesota and the Bloomington, Minnesota, public schools characterized the academic benefits as “small” but the sleep increases as “large.” 

The study was instigated by the school district of Bloomington, home to the Mall of America and headquarters of International Dairy Queen, because it had been considering whether to shift its schools to a later start time and wanted more data to inform the decision. Local officials pressed the snooze button on this sleep debate during the Covid pandemic. But the researchers presented their study, “Changes in school start time have a significant effect in the amount of sleep and reported grade point average of students,” in April 2021 at a session of the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. 

I thought the research was interesting in a national context as it slightly bolsters the evidence for starting school later but isn’t quite the knockout punch that advocates hoped to make.

Nationally, Minnesota has been at the forefront of starting school later in the morning. Edina, an affluent Minneapolis suburb, is believed to be the first town in the U.S. to shift to a later start, moving in 1996 from 7:20 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. in response to medical research about teen sleep. In 2014, the American Pediatric Association recommended an 8:30 a.m. start time for high schools and middle schools so that teens can get sufficient sleep.  

Schools have been slow to heed the doctors’ advice. Only 17 percent of U.S. high schools start the day at 8:30 a.m. or later, according to the most recent federal data. The average start time for high school across the nation remains a half hour earlier, at 8:00 a.m.. South Carolina has the latest high school start time in the nation of 8:34 a.m., followed by Alaska, Minnesota and Iowa. The earliest is Louisiana, where high schools start at 7:30 a.m., on average.

Advocates often assert that later start times have been proven to improve academic performance but I was surprised to learn how murky the research evidence is. Researchers don’t always find academic gains and where they exist, they tend to be small.  For example, a 2015 study of elementary school students in Wayzata, Minnesota, found only small increases in reading and math scores and the increase wasn’t seen for all students.  A 2018 study reported increases in grades and attendance in one Seattle high school but not in another. 

“The findings from all of the research regarding the relationship between start time, sleep duration, and academic performance are not totally conclusive,” said Kyla Wahlstrom, a national expert of school start time research at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the current study, via email. 

“That said, after 25 years of my looking at academic performance and start time, there is no question in my mind that greater sleep, meaning eight hours or more per night for teens, does in fact yield better academic performance,” Wahlstrom said. “This is because there is incontrovertible evidence that sleep enhances cognition and memory.” 

In the current study, four Minnesota districts — Wayzata, Burnsville, Richfield, and Mounds View — moved to a later school start time between 2016 and 2019. One shifted from 7:25 a.m. to 8:35 a.m.; a second shifted from 7:30 a.m. to 8:20 a.m.; a third shifted from 7:33 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., and a fourth shifted from 8:10 a.m. to 8:30 a.m.. Researchers compared results for 18,000 students in these districts with 20,000 students in similar districts that continued to start the day early. Districts were matched by similar demographic characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, language and family income. Researchers also factored in how students responded to survey questions about how much they cared about doing well in school.

One surprising result were the positive outcomes for 5th graders, who not only slept more but also achieved higher grades when they started school later. Advocates for later start times often focus on teens and are less worried about younger kids’ sleep. Perhaps the assumption that it’s more natural for younger kids to go to sleep earlier and wake up earlier needs to be re-evaluated. By contrast, the researchers didn’t see extra academic benefits for 11th graders after switching to a later schedule, compared to similar students in districts that continued to start the day early. 

There seems to be no harm to children in switching to later school schedules but there are many obstacles. Julio Caesar, a research scientist at Bloomington Public Schools and one of the study’s authors, explained that teachers unions are often resistant to moving teachers’ work schedules. Many communities have a limited number of buses and have to stagger school start times, forcing younger kids to start earlier when older kids start later. Those changes can upset family schedules and create resistance from parents. Starting school later leads to ending school later and that can cut into precious after-school sports time. 

One silver lining to the Covid pandemic is that there are fewer logistical challenges to later start times when you’re learning remotely from home and school activities are canceled. My daughter’s middle school in Brooklyn switched to a 9 a.m. start during the current 2020-21 school year and I’ve noticed that she’s less groggy in the morning. It will be interesting to see what her school and others decide to do about the schedule next year when normal life returns. 

Advocates for later start times see an opening now with so many school norms upended. That’s something to dream about.

This story about school start times was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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