As the Covid-19 pandemic has shifted the majority of education online, concerns have been raised about the inequalities this might produce, as children from poorer families lack the tools and environment to thrive in such a setting.

A recent experiment from Harvard Kennedy School explored how a low-cost online homework tutoring program that utilized university students as tutors could help to close any achievement gaps that may have emerged during the pandemic.

Each student was given three hours of online tutoring per week, and this proved to be enough to deliver significant gains on the performance, aspirations, socio-emotional skills, and overall wellbeing of the student.  What’s more, these gains could be doubled if students were given six hours of tutoring per week.

Widespread improvements

As important as the academic improvements seen by the tutoring, the experiment revealed that students gained psychologically as well, and revealed higher happiness levels at the end of the experiment, with fewer plans to abandon studies.

“The COVID pandemic emphasized educational inequalities across the world,” the researchers say. “But the educational gap based on family background is a persistent feature of school systems at any time and we found an effective way to address it.”

Buoyed by the success of the experiment, the researchers plan to expand the program to a wider pool of students and tutors across a number of countries.

The researchers found that the share of students receiving help with their schoolwork from people who were neither parents or siblings fell from 12.8% before the pandemic to 2.9% during it.  The share of students doing their homework on their own also grew to 62.1%.

The university students were given brief training in tutoring across Maths, English and Italian, before being paired up with middle school students in Italy who had been identified as having language barriers, difficult family backgrounds, or learning disorders.

“The experiment worked as a proof of concept,” the researchers conclude. “We have shown that you only need a limited amount of resources to contain the educational gap. Our experience could turn out to be very useful in case of new or persistent lockdowns”.