A decade ago, Professor Susanna Loeb and her research team launched a text messaging program in San Francisco to support early literacy in preschoolers. Tips by Text, which was inspired by a school district collaborator, sent parents timely, evidence-backed advice to build language and reading skills in their children. Studies of the program showed strong learning gains for the children and more parent engagement at home as a result.
Since then, Loeb has built on those promising findings, and expanded the program to serve families of students from various age groups and in districts across the U.S. as well as China, the UK, Denmark, and Singapore.
By all accounts, Tips by Text’s widespread use is a big win for a research-based solution. More often, scholarship-driven tools don’t get beyond the initial classroom in which they were tested, no matter how promising the findings or well-intentioned the scholar and school.
Bringing an effective model from one student to a classroom, district and beyond means many, many more students can reap the benefits of high quality instruction and education innovation including improved academic achievement, enhanced well-being, and stronger, more meaningful engagement in learning. These positive student outcomes spill over into families and communities, creating healthier and more sustainable societies.
Over the past couple of years, scaling well-researched solutions has been shown to also counter the negative effects of the pandemic, Loeb said, from widening achievement gaps and missed school time, to poorer social and emotional development. Her team recently launched the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) to address educational inequities resulting from the pandemic. NSSA conducts research on the most promising tutoring practices and works with district leaders and others to provide research-backed guidance on implementing high-impact tutoring.
“Our students deserve this work,” Loeb said. “From our research, we learn so much about how to engage students and accelerate their learning. The practical, easy-to-use learnings from research need to reach decision makers so that our students can benefit.”
Tips by Text and NSSA are part of SCALE, Loeb’s new initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, a university-wide effort addressing some of the most challenging issues in education through research, partnerships, and technological innovation.
SCALE works with education’s decision makers to implement evidence-based practices that can make a difference for student learning. SCALE is also creating a network of education scholars and leaders that will help speed up the research and implementation processes.
“Sometimes it’s assumed that you develop knowledge as a researcher, and that knowledge can immediately be taken up in schools like magic,” said Loeb. “It’s not magic. We need to fit our research in with the actual decisions practitioners are making.”
Partnering for scale
In the United States alone, there are nearly 14,000 school districts and nearly 100,000 public schools operating in a highly decentralized system. Around the world, each nation operates its education system differently and independently within their own languages, cultural norms, and policies. Those numbers showcase how difficult it is to adopt new learning solutions writ large, but now consider, Loeb says, that each education system or environment also requires funding, regulation, capacity, and other resources – in addition to the new solution.
Loeb said creating partnerships helps facilitate implementation and can inform what research to pursue in the first place. Loeb and her team are creating the Stanford Education Research Partnership Network within the SCALE initiative to work with partner districts and organizations to learn about their needs and to share research findings with the field.
“Partnerships are so important to the work because they give us insight into what the real questions are and where the opportunities are,” says Loeb. When a research study is based on a real need or opportunity for decision makers, it is more likely to be useful in practice.
SCALE’s partnership model has been honed over many iterations of work between researchers and decision makers.
Years ago, Loeb led the Getting Down to Facts projects that analyzed for state leaders California’s PreK-12 education system to identify what was working well and where improvements were still needed. She was also the founding director of the Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA), a research hub for scholars examining policies and practices in schools. Additionally, she was co-director of Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) which reports many of its findings to lawmakers and others.
And with Tips by Text and NSSA, she has been widely successful in identifying areas where decision makers need support and packaging research as a usable tool.
“Leaders of each school and the leaders of each district are making a lot of the key education decisions, and within schools, teachers are making a lot of decisions for their own classrooms,” Loeb said. “You have to reach a wide range of people in order to have a meaningful effect on what goes on in our education system.”
Impact at scale
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Loeb met with fellow education researchers about how to support the millions of students who were disconnected from school and losing large amounts of instructional time. High-impact tutoring, which is relationship-based tutoring delivered in school at least three times a week in small groups with a consistent and effective tutor, emerged as an intervention with a strong base of evidence for supporting individual student needs. The research indicated high-impact tutoring could be a game changer for learners emerging from the pandemic and beyond. NSSA was born.
NSSA uses three strategies to support education decision makers to create and implement effective tutoring programs: research on how to do tutoring most effectively (frequency of sessions, virtual vs. in-person instruction, student-tutor ratios, how best to use technology, and making programs more cost-effective); tools and playbooks for districts, families, state policy makers, and tutoring providers; and engagement opportunities to connect the players across the high-impact tutoring ecosystem.
To date, the NSSA team has conducted 37 research studies about tutoring, published over 40 tools and briefs, provided strategic advising for approximately 300 districts, cities, states, tutoring providers, and federal education institutions, and informed statewide tutoring programs and policies in Florida, Michigan, and Oregon. The White House education priorities for 2024 included high-dosage tutoring and drew upon NSSA’s work, and states including New Jersey, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Montana cited NSSA research and tools by name in their statewide tutoring resources. Tutoring has become a widely recognized strategy to overcome the learning disruptions of the pandemic; 80% of U.S. states have provided funding that could be used for tutoring programs as part of pandemic relief, and 53% of U.S. schools offered high-impact tutoring during the 2023-24 school year.
A vision for the future of learning
The next project for SCALE is generative AI. Loeb and her team, with input from practitioners, will identify the questions, needs, and opportunities that educators have about generative AI, conduct new research, and communicate that research through usable tools back to the decision makers.
“Generative AI is still early days right now: the body of research studies about generative AI and learning impact is nascent and about half of U.S. states have developed policy guidance for generative AI for their school districts,” said Chris Agnew, director of the Generative AI for Education Hub within SCALE . “A lot of states are looking for resources on how to think about the technology and provide guidance to their districts and schools on how to use generative AI in a way that benefits learning.”
Agnew has been interviewing district and state education leaders from across the country about their metrics for success, gaps in knowledge, and sources of information about the use of generative AI in the classroom.
“It’s a powerful technology and can be really polarizing for educators and school leaders. There’s a sense of them being either all in or all out,” said Agnew. Leaders have expressed an immediate need for data on what types of uses of generative AI in the classroom are working and a playbook of how to build a plan to use it effectively. Many also want to understand the long term impacts on students, highlighting social media as a cautionary tale. To begin to address these needs, Agnew has been developing a research repository as a tool for educators and leaders to explore evidence-based use cases of generative AI.
Looking ahead, Agnew sees SCALE’s role as laying the groundwork for decision makers to dream big. “What I'm really excited about, and I think is essential for us doing our work well, is balancing being that trusted source for education leaders on what we know works, while also holding an aspirational vision for what this technology can unlock.”
“My hope is that SCALE and the Accelerator can help the education system reach a broad range of students: some who are thriving, but far too many who are not.”
Professor Susanna Loeb, faculty director of the SCALE initiative
Loeb said the current SCALE projects demonstrate what’s possible when researchers and educators work together to serve school and community needs. The goal is to continue a model of seizing opportunities to learn and to help facilitate widespread adoption of effective solutions.
“My hope is that SCALE and the Accelerator can help the education system reach a broad range of students: some who are thriving, but far too many who are not,” Loeb said. “We could do so much more to have their childhoods be rewarding and happy, by having experiences in schools that foster joy and curiosity, and providing them the skills they need to thrive.”
