Remote Small Group Tutoring for Fractional Reasoning with Upper Elementary Students

Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Overdeck Fund, Digital Promise partnered with Cignition, from 2020 through 2022, to study design elements of online group tutoring for upper elementary students' fractional reasoning. Our primary goal was to increase student-to-student collaboration with students who are below grade level and/or Black, Latino, and/or experiencing poverty. We designed over 50 sequenced fractional reasoning lessons which went through four rounds of development with approximately 300 fifth-grade public school students from multiple districts across the nation. The final lessons were used in a randomized controlled trial study of online tutoring with groups of four students and their growth on a pre and post diagnostic. A meaningfully large effect size was shown between treatment and control students, which strongly suggests those who received group tutoring benefitted compared to those who did not attend group tutoring.