Reading Partners is a nationwide leader in literacy tutoring, offering one-on-one tutoring to thousands of students in grades K-4 across the country. Reading Partners offers tutoring via in-person instruction at school-based reading centers (RPT) and online through the Reading Partners Connects (RPCx) program. A prior rigorous evaluation has shown that Reading Partners traditional in-person program is an effective literacy intervention (Jacob et al, 2016; Reichardt et al., 2017). Reading Partners applied for and received an Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Grant from the US Department of Education to scale and evaluate their Reading Partners Connects (RPCx) program. However, the EIR grant only provides funds to evaluate RPCx relative to a business-as-usual control group. This proposal outlines a proposed three-arm, within-school randomized control trial, in which individual students are randomly assigned to one of three groups: 1) Reading Partners traditional (RPT) in-person tutoring program, 2) Reading Partners Connects (RPCx) online tutoring program, or 3) a business-as-usual control group. The proposed design will allow us to: 1) update our knowledge of RPT effectiveness, 2) compare the effectiveness of the online tutoring to the in-person tutoring model, and 3) collect longer-term follow-up impact data that has not been possible in the past.
Funding:
Reading Partners
Funding Period:
07/01/2023 to 12/31/2026