Abstract
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, public schools in the Dominican Republic (DR) were closed for over 12 months. School closures are expected to lead to learning losses and increased dropout rates, especially among the most vulnerable. In the absence of compensatory actions, the COVID-19 pandemic poses the risk of exacerbating low learning levels and increasing current inequalities. The Tutoring Online Project (TOP) aims to mitigate these losses by offering personalized tutoring to public school students in the DR. This intervention will be implemented by J-PAL Latin America and the Caribbean (J-PAL LAC) with support of the Ministry of Education in public secondary schools in the country, leveraging partnerships with local universities. TOP-DR will recruit 600 volunteer university and randomly match them with 800 students from disadvantaged backgrounds in public schools. The project has been already implemented and evaluated in Italy in 2020-2021 and in the DR in the summer of 2021. In this phase we plan to build evidence on how to effectively deliver tutor at-scale, exploring alternative modes of delivery (paired and individual tutoring) and tutor profiles (high achieving high school students and university students).