Effectiveness of tutoring at school: A machine learning evaluation

Abstract

Tutoring programs are effective in reducing school failures among at-risk students. However, there is still room for improvement in maximising the social returns they provide on investments. Many factors and components can affect student engagement in a program and academic success. This complexity presents a challenge for Public Administrations to use their budgets as efficiently as possible. Our research focuses on providing public administration with advanced decision-making tools. First, we analyse a database with information on 2066 students of the Programa para la Mejora de Éxito Educativo (Programme for the Improvement of Academic Success) of the Junta de Comunidades de Castilla y Léon in Spain, in 2018–2019, the academic year previous to the pandemic. This program is designed to help schools with students at risk of failure in Spanish, literature, mathematics, and English. We developed a machine learning model (ML) based on Kohonen self-organising maps (SOMs), which are a type of unsupervised (ANN), to group students based on their characteristics, the type of tutoring program in which they were enrolled, and their results in both the completion of the program and the 4th year of Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO). Second, we evaluated the results of tutoring programs and identified and explained how different factors and components affect student engagement and academic success. Our findings provide Public Administrations with better decision-making tools to evaluate and measure the results of tutoring programs in terms of social return on investment, improve the design of these programs, and choose the students to enrol.