High-Dosage Tutoring Can Make a Real Difference. Harvard's Strategic Data Project Wants to Help Districts Make the Most Of It

The Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR)’s Strategic Data Project has released a new toolkit to help bring effective high-dosage tutoring to students around the country.

“Measure, Monitor, Improve: Data Tools for Understanding High-Dosage Tutoring Implementation” aims to help solve common challenges when bringing tutoring programs to students and provides a set of data collection strategies, tools, and best practices for district leaders, policymakers, and academic researchers.

The toolkit is a collaboration between the Strategic Data Project, the national nonprofit Accelerate, and representatives from state departments of education in five U.S. states — Delaware, Colorado, Ohio, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Supported by the Overdeck Family Foundation, the project serves a shared goal: to use data to expand access to effective tutoring in real schools around the country.

“For over a decade, the Strategic Data Project has partnered with education agencies to strengthen their capacity for using data effectively,” said Miriam Greenburg, senior director of the Strategic Data Project, on the toolkit's webpage. “This toolkit is another step in our mission to ensure that every program, including high-dosage tutoring, is informed by meaningful evidence and analysis.”

Details Make the Difference

Research has proven high-dosage tutoring is a powerful intervention that can improve student learning. It’s been an especially promising resource in post-pandemic academic recovery as federal funding flooded districts seeking ways to recoup learning loss. That promise, the Strategic Data Project notes, requires specific attention to the details of where funding for tutoring is allocated and its impact on students.

“America has already invested billions of dollars in tutoring. But when we judge reforms by their design instead of their delivery, we end up declaring failure before programs ever had a chance to succeed, even those with decades of rigorous evidence behind them,” wrote Greenberg in a blog post detailing findings last month. “Tutoring remains one of the most powerful tools to help students recover and thrive. Its future depends not on whether the idea was sound, but on whether we have the discipline to make it work for the children who need it most.” 

Measure, Monitor, Improve 

The toolkit includes resources such as a Data Dictionary to promote consistent data collection, suggestions of data collection protocols and a data collection tool, as well as a narrative overview of the working group’s overall findings about high-dosage tutoring and its impact.

The resources also include a case study from each of the five states whose education departments helped in its creation. The Colorado case study, for example, highlights how a culture of data sharing can be encouraged by stakeholders, while the Delaware Case study uncovered whether tutoring was taking place as scheduled using data collected as outlined in a Data Dictionary.

Also included in the toolkit is a dashboard to help visualize tutoring data. Users can download an editable copy and insert their own district, state, or vendor data to track the impact of a tutoring program, show where students are most likely to engage in tutoring, correlate the relationship between tutoring and test scores, and even map where tutoring is available in a given region.

Future Projects 

The Strategic Data Project’s toolkit plans to evolve as more data is collected and new states get involved. The non-profit Accelerate plans to capture best practices in the Data Alignment and Tutoring Assessment Standards (DATAS) tool. The fall of 2025 also saw the Strategic Data Project add fellows from six new states, which will expand the High-Dosage Tutoring Toolkit’s reach in the future.