The Effectiveness of Volunteer Tutoring Programs: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Based on increasing demands for accountability in schools, school administrators are looking for ways to increase the academic performance of students including tutoring. Currently a variety of tutoring approaches are used including volunteer tutoring, peer tutoring, cross-age tutoring, and one-on-one tutoring. The evidence base related to volunteer tutoring has grown in recent years; consequently, this review is based upon only those evaluations of volunteer programs in which tutees were randomly assigned to a treatment or control group. We found 21 studies (with 27 different study cohorts in those studies because several studies provided separate reporting on multiple cohorts) reporting on randomized field trials to guide us in assessing the effectiveness of volunteer tutoring programs. The results of the review were based on the data from 1,676 study participants in 28 study cohorts in 21 research articles or reports. The analysis of these studies – most of which included relatively small samples – showed that volunteer tutoring programs can positively influence language and reading outcomes for students. The average effect of volunteer tutoring programs on reading outcomes for elementary students is 0.23. After removing one outlier study which disproportionately influenced by the overall result, we found an average effect size of 0.30. We also found several significant results in the meta-analyses of specific academic domains. The outcomes where volunteer tutoring programs made a significant difference were Reading Global (effect size = 0.26), Letters and Words (effect size = 0.41), Oral Fluency (effect size = 0.30), and Writing (effect size = 0.45). We found positive, but not significant, effects of volunteer tutoring on Reading – Comprehension and Mathematics. When we analyzed the reading outcomes separately by study characteristics, we found no significant difference in effect size by tutor type, grade level, or program focus. Highly structured tutoring programs had a significantly greater effect on global reading outcomes than programs with low structure, but not on the other outcome types. The difference in effect sizes between studies published in journals and non-published studies was not statistically significant. Other tests of publication bias also suggested the included studies were an unbiased sample.