We've been able to share really exciting data from this past school year recently.  And now here is some data from the year before that.  These results were a long time coming, and we've learned a lot in the past two years, but here they are.

During the 2022-23 school year, Once partnered with a large, urban school district on the East Coast to provide high-impact, early literacy tutoring to 105 kindergarten and first grade students in 13 schools. The district identified students as eligible for tutoring services if they scored below grade-level benchmarks in their early literacy skills. A research team from Stanford's National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) randomly assigned eligible students into a tutoring program group (n=105) and a comparison group (n=199). Students in the program group were supposed to receive one-on-one tutoring, from a non-teaching staff member at their school, for 15 minutes every day during the school day between November 2022 and June 2023.

Students randomly assigned to receive Once tutoring performed two points better on the end-of-year DIBELS assessment compared to students in the comparison group. The sample size of the study was too small to determine whether this difference is the result of the tutoring, but it points to the promise of larger-scale evaluations. Notably, students received, on average, just 42 fifteen-minute tutoring sessions, far less than Once’s intended dosage of 140 fifteen-minute sessions. This suggests the need to address challenges with program implementation so as to more closely match Once’s intended program dosage with the actual dosage of tutoring that students receive, something that we've made a lot of progress on in the last two years.

While the study was a pilot and not large enough to detect significant differences between the program and comparison groups, it does provide indications that Once tutoring could lead to positive impacts on students’ early literacy skills. Students in the program group, particularly male students and students scoring far below average on initial assessments, scored higher on end-of-year assessments than their peers in the comparison group. Overall, the average fall-to-spring gains in DIBELS scores observed in kindergarten and first-grade students in the study were on par or greater than what NSSA has observed in other research sites indicating that all students (regardless of their participation in Once tutoring) made progress in their early literacy skills, obfuscating NSSA’s ability to investigate the causal effect of Once.