High impact tutoring is one of the most promising strategies for reducing opportunity gaps in education (Slavin & Steiner, 2020). It produces more impacts per dollar than approaches such as direct cash transfers and class-size reduction (Cook et al., 2015). Although tutoring has the potential to be highly effective, its adoption by policymakers remains limited, due in part to the prevalence of poor-quality tutoring programs. To address this issue in our community, we are implementing a design-based approach to evidence-based tutoring through a collaborative effort among a cognitive development research lab, a tutoring provider, a teacher formation program, and several schools and afterschool programs. Our approach integrates two sometimes competing approaches – those designed to generate robust causal evidence and those that focus on service to practitioners implementing programs and practices in context. The work is accomplished through a design team that includes tutors, instructional coaches, cognitive scientists, psychologists, teacher educators, and school administrators. Pilot results are promising based on a range of evaluation methods. In this talk, I’ll describe the genesis of our initiative and showcase how a design-based approach to evidence-based tutoring can accelerate student learning, strengthen educator pipelines, and provide a beneficial infrastructure for cognitive science.

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