EPI Speakers Series Talk

"The On-going Evaluation of a Volunteer Tutoring Program for Struggling Readers"

Robin Tepper Jacob, Research Associate Professor , Co-Director, Youth Policy Lab

Competence and confidence in reading constitute the foundation for all educational achievement. Students who struggle with reading inevitably struggle with all academic course work, and those who begin school behind their peers rarely catch up without significant intervention. Given the centrality of reading skills, the national statistics on literacy attainment, even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, were deeply distressing: two out of three American fourth-graders are reading below grade level, and almost one-third of children nationwide lack even basic reading skills. 

This talk will tell the story of an on-going evaluation of the Reading Partners program, a successful one-on-one volunteer tutoring program that serves struggling readers in elementary schools serving students from families with low-income. The talk will first summarize the results of an initial evaluation, conducted in 19 schools in three states, and which involved 1,265 students. It will then describe a new planned evaluation of the program, which will assess the effectiveness of program adaptations that have been made in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the increasing demand for school-based tutoring. 

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