Intervention(s)
The Intervention: The study design is a randomized control trial (RCT) that compares the reading proficiency of kindergarten students who receive the accelerated 1:1 high dosage tutoring support to kindergarten students who receive the regular 1:1 high dosage tutoring support. The study will involve 800 kindergarten students enrolled in 40 kindergarten classrooms identified by the district who agree to participate in Chapter One’s 1:1 high dosage tutoring, randomly assigning 400 to one treatment group (T1, accelerated tutoring) and 400 to the other treated group (T2, regular tutoring). All students in the study will receive the tutoring support (i.e., accelerated tutoring or regular tutoring) throughout their kindergarten school year assuming they remain enrolled in the school district.
The RCT will be undertaken to determine if the accelerated tutoring support contributes to reading proficiency and, if yes, to what extent? Two hypotheses will be tested,
(1) Null hypothesis: Students’ proficiency on literacy outcomes is equal between two groups, one that receives the accelerated tutoring (treated group, T1) and one that receives the regular tutoring (treated group, T2).
(2) Alternative hypothesis: Students who receive the accelerated tutoring (T1) will make greater gains on literacy outcomes than students who receive the regular tutoring (T2).
Random assignment to both treatment groups (e.g., accelerated tutoring group (T1) vs. regular tutoring group (T2)) will create baseline equivalence of the two groups or no systematic differences at baseline, thereby reducing bias. To strengthen internal validity, members of the two groups will be similar in age, grade level, enrollment in classrooms, and performance level in literacy.
Research Question: This RCT study aims to address the following research question: What is the effect of the accelerated tutoring support (T1) on students’ literacy outcomes compared to students’ literacy outcomes who received the regular tutoring support (T2)?
Randomization: To assign students to one of the experimental conditions, we will employ a student-level randomized control trial design. Specifically, within each classroom (N=40), we randomly assigned half of the students to receive the accelerated tutoring support (treated group, T1) and half of the other students received the regular tutoring support (treated group, T2). The total randomization sample consist of 800 students enrolled in kindergarten classrooms: 400 students in one treated group (accelerated tutoring, T1) and 400 students in the other treated group (regular tutoring, T2).