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by Lorrae Famiglietti on Oct 30, 2026, 9:15:00 AM
When district leaders ask us about our tutors, their first questions are often about credentials, like whether BookNook tutors have a degree or how many years of classroom experience they have. In fact, those credentials have been a point of pride for us at BookNook since our founding, and they’re still worth sharing.
But a new study published by researchers at Stanford University and the University of Florida suggests that those credentials may tell us less about effectiveness than we assume.
The findings made me rethink how we talk about tutor effectiveness, including which data points we lean on and what else we should track to know whether a tutor is actually helping a student learn.
What the research found
The September 2026 study, Tutor Traits and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment, looked at an online, high-dosage elementary literacy program where tutors were randomly assigned to students, and then examined which tutor traits predicted how much those students grew in reading.
The trait that mattered most was prior experience with the tutoring provider itself. Students assigned to tutors who had worked with the provider in past years grew about 0.2 standard deviations more in literacy than students assigned to tutors who were new to the provider. This was the largest association of any trait that researchers measured.
Traditional credentials didn’t hold up in the same way. A bachelor’s degree, classroom teaching experience, and teaching assistant experience were not associated with student literacy growth. Students of tutors without a degree, most of whom were still in college, did about as well as students of degree holders.
The authors’ conclusion is the part I keep coming back to. Like BookNook, the provider gave every tutor the same research-based curriculum, coaching, and professional development, and when a program is built that way, tutors from varied backgrounds can support student learning. It’s also the part of the study that made me look hardest at how we describe our own tutors.
What experience gives a tutor
Because the study pointed to a tutor’s experience with the provider as the trait most associated with student growth, the first thing I wanted to know was how much of our tutoring is done by tutors who have been with us before. Last school year, 73% of our tutors had tutored with us in a prior school year, and they led 79% of our sessions. Looking further back, 41% of the tutors who started tutoring with us in 2022-23 have tutored with BookNook for three or more school years. That doesn’t tell us whether experience makes our tutors more effective, but it does mean most students who sit down with a BookNook tutor work with someone who has tutored with us before.
What experience actually adds is a harder question. Data can usually tell you where to look, but it rarely tells you why, and the study is candid that it can’t fully answer this either. The authors note that their design can’t separate tutors getting better through time with the provider from stronger tutors being the ones who come back year after year.
When I think about what a returning tutor brings to a session, most of it is familiarity. They know the lessons and how to pace a session; they’re comfortable with virtual classroom tools, and they’ve seen what it looks like when a student is stuck and needs extra attention. A new tutor has to learn all of that, and the question for any provider is how much of it we can hand them before their first session rather than leaving them to pick it up over their first few sessions with us.
What a degree can’t tell you
The credentials finding stood out to me because a tutor’s degree and classroom experience are the details we’ve shared most with district and school leaders. They still tell you something about a tutor’s background and experience. At the same time, they can’t tell you whether that same tutor will notice when a third grader loses the thread of a reading passage and needs the idea explained differently.
That moment depends a lot on the supports a provider builds around the tutor. Every BookNook reading session runs on a curriculum lesson aligned to the Science of Reading. Because the lessons are built into the platform itself, a tutor with a graduate degree and a tutor still in a certification program are teaching from the same research-based material. Each lesson is built around a specific skill and learning objective, with activities that take the student from learning a skill to practicing and applying it. In those same lessons, tutors have embedded scaffolding and conversation starters, and they’re backed by ongoing coaching and professional development. We’ve designed it this way so a tutor can spend their attention on the student, listening to how students are thinking, catching misconceptions, adjusting their explanations, and building a relationship with students that supports learning.
Questions for district leaders
If you’re evaluating a tutoring program, credentials and experience are worth asking about, but they’re only part of what a student actually experiences in a session. I’d add these questions to your list:
- How does the provider support tutors throughout their time with the program?
- What instructional materials and routines guide each session?
- How does the program keep instruction quality consistent for students?
- How does the provider measure student progress, and how is that information used to improve instruction?
- What evidence demonstrates that the tutoring approach is working?
These questions can help you examine the instructional experience students actually receive, rather than relying entirely on the tutor’s qualifications. Tutoring providers can also apply for the National Student Support Accelerator’s Program Design Badge, which asks them to show evidence of the processes behind questions like these. BookNook has earned it, and it’s a fair thing to ask any provider you’re considering.
What I’m taking from this study
One of the things I appreciate most about this study is that it challenges us to look more carefully at the assumptions we make about tutoring as a whole, and to be more honest about what a credential can and can’t tell a district leader.
We still have more to learn about how tutor experience, instructional materials, ongoing support, and student relationships work together to influence academic growth, and that’s a question that careful research like this is better positioned to answer than any single provider’s data.
One thing is clear: evaluating tutor quality requires looking at more than a résumé, and as tutoring providers, we have a responsibility to create the conditions where any tutor can teach effectively.
Research referenced: Huffaker, E., Markel, B. L., Robinson, C. D., & Loeb, S. (2026). Tutor Traits and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment. Annenberg Institute at Brown University, EdWorkingPaper 26-1595. https://doi.org/10.26300/jgzm-qp55
BookNook figures are based on internal analyses of tutoring activity, primarily from the 2025–26 school year. These observational findings should not be interpreted as causal estimates.