The growing field of study and research about Out-of-School Time education holds great promise for addressing major educational challenges. For this potential to be reached, it's essential that tutoring organizations and other actors actively participate in the field by sharing their own experiences and insights -- adding their own unique contribution to the larger discourse through rigorous data analysis, publication, and dissemination. This really is a dynamic field of ongoing discovery and collaboration.

 

A story by way of example: One of the biggest challenges in many corners of Out-of-School-Time education is trying to determine the cost-effectiveness of a tutoring program (its Return-on-Investment, if you will). In May 2024, Luke Kohlmoos and Matthew P. Steinberg of Accelerate (The National Collaborative for Accelerated Learning) published a research report which proposed a new measure of tutoring program impact efficiency. Through our connections with Stanford's National Student Support Accelerator, TutorSmart caught wind of the new measure and began adopting it internally to evaluate our own cost-effectiveness.

 

Then, in September of 2024, Amanda Neitzel and Nathan Storey of Johns Hopkins University's Center for Research and Reform in Education published a randomized evaluation of a virtual tutoring model run by Air Reading (an organization TutorSmart's Executive Director had connected with through the NSSA as well); this publication had also utilized the new measure Kohlmoos and Steinberg had proposed, providing some of the first new data in the field to be communicated in this way.

 

Now, in turn, TutorSmart is preparing a paper of our own, presenting our 2023-24 cost-effectiveness in terms of the Kohlmoos/Steinberg measure -- so that researchers will have multiple data points to compare and analyze through this new, emerging lens.