Distant but Connected

During the Covid-19 pandemic, schools were suddenly forced to close, depriving millions of students both of the daily educational support from teachers and of social interactions with classmates. However, in Italy—one of the countries most affected in the spring of 2020—an innovative project was launched to offer online tutoring aimed at reducing learning losses and supporting the well-being of the most vulnerable students. A recent scientific paper, published in the prestigious journal American Economic Review, takes stock of this project and shows that the results have been surprisingly positive.

The program, called the Tutoring Online Program (TOP), aimed to connect middle school students from disadvantaged backgrounds with volunteer university tutors, offering three hours per week of free one-on-one support. According to the authors’ estimates, the results were remarkable: in 2020, during school closures, TOP improved students’ math skills by about 0.22 standard deviations—a very significant effect, considering that the international average loss in math achievement due to the pandemic was estimated at 0.17. To give an idea, based on OECD and other studies, a gain of 0.2 standard deviations corresponds to about three months of schooling. And it was not merely an emergency, one-off intervention: when the program was replicated in 2022, with schools reopened, the positive effects were confirmed.

The researchers analyzed what made the tutoring so effective. Students who received more intensive support—six hours per week instead of three—doubled their academic progress and halved their risk of failing the year. One-on-one personalized teaching produced better results than small-group sessions, although the latter remain interesting in terms of cost-effectiveness, since they make it possible to help two students at the same time.

This program affected more than grades. During the months of school closure, when students were isolated from friends and teachers, the tutor became a valuable human point of reference. Students showed higher aspirations, greater perseverance, more confidence in their abilities, and even improved psychological well-being. For immigrant students—often with weaker social networks—the benefit was even more pronounced.

The program also had an impact on the tutors themselves. University students who had volunteered as tutors reported, in the following months, a significant increase in their ability to empathize with others—an improvement in empathy useful not only in interpersonal relationships but also in their future professional lives.

Finally, an important reflection concerns the costs and scalability of the intervention. Unlike in-person tutoring—often too costly to implement on a large scale—TOP relies on university volunteers trained and supported by pedagogical experts, with an average cost of only a few hundred euros per student. It is a sustainable, replicable model that has already inspired other countries, such as Chile, which has launched a national tutoring plan based on student volunteers.

According to the authors, the experience of TOP shows that even in normal times—not only during emergencies—virtual tutoring can provide effective support to vulnerable students and help prevent the widening of inequalities. It is no coincidence that the results were not limited to the extraordinary context of the pandemic: the program’s 2022 replication, with schools open again, confirmed the intervention’s validity, showing that online tutoring can also work as a complementary tool in everyday school life.

Pierluigi Conzo
NP August/September 2025