Helping the Many by Tutoring the Few: The Social Multiplier of Early Literacy Instruction

August 2026

Tutoring is almost always evaluated by randomizing students within schools, a design that differences out any spillover onto classmates. We instead randomize 81 Danish schools and 2,583 kindergartners, tutoring a few children in each and testing all. Decoding improved 0.38 standard deviations among the pre-registered target group and 0.27 SD school-wide. Bounds requiring only the test’s range and random assignment show that never-tutored peers gained at least 0.19 SD, implying a social multiplier of at least three. Tutors were the schools’ own staff, so costs were low. Evaluations of targeted tutoring understate its value two- to threefold.

Keywords

Tutoring, Literacy training, RCT, Kindergarten

Education level

K-12 Education

Topics

Student Learning