Last week, I arrived at college. Immediately presented with hundreds of clubs and opportunities, I signed up to tutor math for elementary and middle school students. In my readings, I discovered how impactful this extra work can be for disadvantaged youth.
An interesting article
Front-loading STEM enrichment to prepare learners for STEM pathways, authored by Paula Olszewski-Kubilius at Northwestern, researched the identification, intervention, assessment, and results of longitudinal tutoring for at-risk students in 3rd grade through high school.
The study discusses how to prepare students for advanced opportunities in high school STEM.
Several key areas were researched and validated. First, instead of simply administering at-risk third graders a test to determine who qualified as a high achiever eligible to be placed in gifted programs, educators employed multiple types of testing, comparing each student’s academic capabilities to their local norms and peer groups.
The students were placed into intense out-of-school programming for more than four hundred hours, during which they were tutored by college students on Saturdays and throughout the summer.
The results: The students excelled academically and, by high school, achieved grades as good as those of non-disadvantaged students and significantly better than those of their disadvantaged peer group. As a result, they eventually enrolled in more competitive colleges and universities.
My Take
Mathematics and STEM courses are vital to our education and the direction of future jobs. The realization that tutoring young, disadvantaged, and at-risk students has the potential to give them access to greater opportunities rather than being left behind is exciting and inspiring.
This work proves that early, positive, thoughtful, consistent, and long-term intervention and investment give students academic opportunities.