Ohio State pre-service teachers tutored central Ohio k-12 students in math and literacy skills.
Students in the College of Education and Human Ecology who are studying to become teachers are already making a difference in the classroom. Over the past two years, selected pre-service teachers put classroom instruction into practice by helping kindergarten through 12th-grade students throughout central Ohio improve their mathematics and literacy skills.
Ohio State was one of a host of colleges and universities across the state that received a total of $14 million in state grants to create or expand mathematics and literacy tutoring programs for Ohio’s K-12 students in one-on-one or small-group settings.
The principal investigators of Ohio State’s portion of the grant are based in the college. Principal investigator Jamie Lipp, a clinical assistant professor of education specializing in literacy, was joined by Terri Bucci, associate professor of mathematics education at Ohio State Mansfield, and Terri Hessler, professor of special education at Ohio State Newark.
“The tutoring that we provided was very high quality and evidence-based,” Hessler said. “That speaks highly of the intervention [programs] that we were running.”
Ohio State received $581,333 of the Statewide Mathematics and Literacy Tutoring Grants, which were issued by the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce and the Ohio Department of Higher Education in the summer of 2022. The tutoring programs were implemented in 2023 and 2024, with the goal of addressing learning gaps that were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, state officials said.
Bucci’s program trained pre-service teachers to provide high-dosage math tutoring. Lipp’s literacy tutoring program focused on responsive teaching based on students’ strengths and needs. Hessler’s program provided structured literacy tutoring in the form of reading intervention aligned with the science of reading.
Hessler’s program conducted tutoring in schools near Ohio State’s Newark campus, while Lipp offered tutoring to schools near the university’s Columbus campus.
High-dosage tutoring is defined as one-on-one or small-group tutoring that takes place more than three days per week or at a rate of at least 50 hours over 36 weeks, according to the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. That research shows high-dosage tutoring can produce large learning gains for a wide range of students, including those who have fallen behind academically.
Lipp said she worked with the college’s literacy expert Shelly Schaub in training pre-service teachers to serve as literacy tutors.
“They would work with groups, anywhere up to four students. They would go during the school day to our two partner schools. That was GEMS, the Graham Elementary and Middle School,” Lipp said. “Patriot Preparatory Academy was another partner school, and this was a first partnership with that charter school. It was a really wonderful experience to partner with them, and we’ve since continued to partner with them.”
In addition to helping students improve their literacy skills, Lipp said the grant enabled her to further research how pairing coursework with field experiences helps pre-service teachers apply what they learn.
“We really wanted to look at the ways in which we prepare pre-service teachers,” she said. “This was a way of getting pre-service teachers in schools not to teach someone else’s lessons and not to teach a lesson that we gave them guidelines for, but they had to teach lessons that were responsive to the students in front of them.”