When Amanda Neitzel first evaluated a live virtual reading-tutoring program called AirReading two years ago, she found what most educators would have predicted: modest results. One semester of live video tutoring nudged struggling early readers forward by roughly a month's worth of learning. But when she ran the study across a full school year, the difference was extraordinary. Literacy gains more than doubled.
"This tutoring should be in school budgets, just like textbooks," says Neitzel, an associate research professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Research and Reform in Education (CRRE) and its deputy director of evidence research. Virtual tutoring in reading, she argues, has moved beyond being temporary pandemic triage.
"We were doing badly before the pandemic," she says. "Far too many kids are not reading proficiently at grade level. So now in my presentations, I sort of lead with, 'We're this many years past the pandemic and literacy scores haven't recovered. Let's take a step back and fix the y-axis on this.'"
Neitzel's latest paper, co-authored with CRRE colleagues Nathan Storey and Xue Wang, reports the results of a randomized controlled trial of AirReading for K–8 students across two districts: a rural, predominantly Hispanic school district in Texas and a larger, diverse suburban district in Louisiana.
Students in grades one through four who had been flagged for reading intervention were randomly assigned either to receive AirReading during the school day or to continue with their usual literacy instruction. AirReading's tutors—all holding bachelor's degrees, prior K–3 classroom experience and state certification—worked with small groups of up to four students in 30-minute virtual sessions four days a week.
The results were clear. Students assigned to AirReading gained the equivalent of 2.8 additional months of learning over their peers in the control group, which the study correlates to roughly an 11-percentile-point jump. According to Neitzel, the results match those typically seen with well-implemented in-person tutoring. The finding is particularly striking because the impact of virtual tutoring had almost no evidence base before the pandemic.
What virtual tutoring cannot do, however, is produce those gains in less time. The study found students who attended at least 56 sessions made larger gains than those who attended fewer. "Sustained exposure is likely necessary," Neitzel and her co-authors wrote, "particularly in early grades where skill development is cumulative and foundational."
Longer sessions do not necessarily mean better results, either. "It's not perfectly linear," Neitzel says. "A lot depends on the age of the kids. A first grader is not going to sit through a 45-minute tutoring session. A lot of times people don't think a 20-minute session is long enough to do anything, but with that age group—if it's really focused and a solid 15 minutes—it is."
These findings come at a time when federal pandemic-relief funds have expired, prompting many school districts with tighter budgets to compress tutoring into shorter windows.
"In the beginning, it was like: We're back from the pandemic and we're just going to do this high-impact tutoring. All the kids will be caught up in three years, and then we're not going to need to keep spending this money," Neitzel says. But she has concluded that this premise never worked and still doesn't.
While education interventions often benefit students who are already doing well, AirReading's benefits were broadly distributed. The study found that English learners, students receiving special education services, economically disadvantaged students and students across racial and ethnic groups gained at the same rate.
One question AirReading's study couldn't answer: Are learning gains retained after tutoring ends? A separate CRRE evaluation that Neitzel led offers an encouraging sign. In a follow-up to the center's earlier study of Ignite Reading, a virtual tutoring program serving first graders, 85% of students who finished the program at a benchmark proficiency were still at benchmark a year later. Neitzel qualifies that this follow-up study was observational, not a controlled trial, but the results are promising.
States are beginning to bet on the model. Last year, Louisiana won a five-year, $15 million federal grant to expand AirReading to roughly 4,500 first and second graders, with CRRE evaluating the rollout across rural and urban school districts.
Neitzel, who taught first grade before becoming a researcher and whose work focuses on closing opportunity gaps, believes the shift could be transformative for low-income students in the bottom quartile.
"It was always hard as a teacher when there were kids you just couldn't help," she says. "Because they just needed more than [what] you teaching 21 first graders at once could do."
More information
Neitzel, A.J., & Storey, N. Air Reading: A randomized evaluation of a virtual tutoring model in Louisiana schools. Center for Research and Reform in Education, Johns Hopkins University. jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/s … 3b829d5018aa/content
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Citation: Virtual tutoring: What started as a pandemic phenomenon has evolved from a temporary fix to an educational fixture (2026, July 10) retrieved 11 July 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-07-virtual-pandemic-phenomenon-evolved-temporary.html
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