If a typical school day is 6 hours, and students are in school for 180 days, they spend approximately 1,080 hours in school over the course of a year.
What happens when kindergarteners spend 20 of those hours receiving one-on-one reading tutoring?
A new study from LXD Research looks at the 822 kindergarten students from 15 schools in one school district in the Midwest that implemented Once and provided both beginning-of-year (BOY) and end-of-year (EOY) data for the 2024-25 school year.
542 of those students started the year below the 50th percentile nationally on i-Ready. Of those students, on average, those who received 20 hours of one-on-one reading tutoring grew over 20 percentile points!
If those students had made a year’s worth of growth (which is sadly not the norm for so many American students), their percentile growth would have been 0. Instead these students accelerated over 20 percentiles. So if, for example, at the beginning of the year, the students’ rank nationally was at the 40th percentile (i.e., they scored worse than 60% of the nation’s kindergarteners), by the end of the year, their rank would be over the 60th percentile (i.e., better than all but 40% of the nation’s kindergarteners).
These results build on our exciting 2023-24 results from 3 schools that delivered Once to every kindergarten student and showed students soaring nationally on i-Ready from the 38th to the 67th percentile.
Congratulations to the school support staff members who provided the tutoring, and the Once coaches, trainers, and staff who supported the instruction.
Of course an important caveat here is that dosage matters! Not every kindergarten student in this study got over 20 hours of one-on-one reading tutoring during the year. In some cases the student was absent. But in others the school support staff member providing the instruction was absent or assigned to other duties. Tutoring only works when it’s actually delivered, and at Once we obsess over delivery metrics to ensure schools deliver as much as possible.
Please read the study, let us know what you think, and contact us if you think Once would be a good fit for your school or district.
And we’ve got more studies coming, so stay tuned!