With all of the focus on early childhood education and the achievement gap, interventions for adolescents have increasingly been viewed as too costly and not worth the effort. A recent study shows why this assumption might not be true and how we can make a difference in the achievement gap with teenagers.

A University of Chicago research team is carrying out the first ever large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) of Match Education’s tutoring program over two years with 5,000 students in 15 Chicago Public School high schools. This tutoring intervention is designed to address the problem of academic mismatch (applying the wrong intervention for kids who are falling behind and exacerbating the downhill slide), providing youth with high-intensity individualized math tutoring – two-on-one instruction for an hour a day, every day (“tutoring on steroids”) – designed to help them catch back up to grade level so that they can reengage with regular classroom instruction.

First year results show that participation in Match improved student math test scores by the equivalent of an extra one to two years of learning for the typical American high school student; reduced math course failures by over 50%; and reduced overall course failures by over one quarter.  See the summary here and a New York Times Op Ed here.

Post contributed by Sara Sternberger.