New tutoring program for area students will use AI

Two Pittsburgh-area schools are working to bolster students’ reading skills impacted by the COVID19 pandemic through a new tutoring program that uses community volunteers and artificial intelligence.

The program — being offered by Literacy Pittsburgh, a Downtownbased literacy organization — will soon work with young students in the Clairton School District and Catalyst Academy Charter School in Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar. It will combine in-person tutoring sessions taught by community volunteers with AI, which will create customized lessons that cater to the specific reading needs of each student.

The goal is to bring the program, free to the districts, to underserved schools in an effort to help with learning loss following the pandemic.

“They’re really at risk for a really unsatisfying and frustrating school experience if they’re not getting the help they need to read early,” Carey Harris, Literacy Pittsburgh’s CEO, said of the students. “Less needy schools and less needy kids have resources to pay for their own tutor. We’re driving the resources where they can be the most useful.”

Through the program, a volunteer will go into the schools twice a week for 30 minutes to work one-onone with students or in a small group. Curriculum used in the sessions will be developed by the Pittsburgh-based tutoring organization OpenLiteracy. It will follow the science of reading, an increasingly popular body of research focused on how students learn to read.

At the end of each session, students will fill out an exit ticket that will be used to gauge what they learned and what they need to work on. Artificial intelligence will then use those answers and the curriculum to develop a lesson tailored to each child.

The program, based on a previous tutoring initiative that paired older adults with students, was created through a $490,000 investment from the Richard King Mellon Foundation. It is expected to start in the fall.

It comes as students across the country continue to face deep learning setbacks in reading and math following the pandemic. During the 2022-23 school year, nearly three years after COVID-19 first began to spread across the country, students were showing minimal improvements in math and reading, according to a report from the Northwest Evaluation Association. Third graders, who were kindergarteners when the pandemic began, had the largest reading achievement gap out of all grade levels, the report found.

Given those numbers, several districts across the country and region used pandemic relief funds to hire tutors and other supports to help students recover academically. But the NWEA in 2022 found the average student still needed the equivalent of 4.1 additional months of instruction to catch up to preCOVID reading levels, The Associated Press reported.

Now, the Literacy Pittsburgh program aims to close that gap.

At Clairton — which educates 823 students, 77% of whom are economically disadvantaged — the program will be used with students in kindergarten through second grade. The district, said Superintendent Tamara Allen-Thomas, is hopeful the sessions will help close the COVID-related learning loss “gap even more.” And, she noted, the program will help the district, which is one of the state’s 100 poorest schools, provide vital services to students.

“We don’t have that luxury” to purchase programs and pay for staff “so we depend heavily on the philanthropy of our neighbors, or community, to help reach those goals that we set for our scholars,” Ms. Allen-Thomas said.

She added that resources received by districts “should not be because of your ZIP code.” In Pennsylvania, the school funding system, which was ruled unconstitutional last year, relies heavily on local property taxes, leading to large disparities among poor and wealthy districts.

At Catalyst Academy, the program will be offered to third graders, founder and CEO Brian Smith said. The K-8 charter school predominantly serves low-income families and students living in the Hill District, Garfield, East Liberty, Larimer, Lincoln-Lemington, Homewood and East Hills communities, as well as families from across Pittsburgh.

“For all schools there’s limited resources … and one of the things that’s exciting is they’re fusing technology into how the limited resources are being used,” Mr. Smith said. “I think it’s kind of raised the effectiveness of the tutoring program overall.”

The AI lessons are being developed by Pittsburgh-based Resilient Cognitive Solutions. And Literacy Pittsburgh is currently recruiting volunteers to participate in the program. Between 10 and 20 volunteers are needed to participate across both sites.

Those interested in helping can sign up on the organization’s website.

Literacy Pittsburgh is expecting to expand the program to additional schools in coming years. The goal is to increase literacy among at least 100 elementary students from schools with high concentrations of low-income students and low levels of proficiency on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment exams.

“It truly is going to be, for these tutors and for the kids, a very rewarding experience,” Caitlin Griffiths, Literacy Pittsburgh’s director of child and family programs, said. “Just speaking with the tutors and seeing the passion and the excitement of being able to work with young people in the schools when they know that there is such a need, it’s very important.”