In February 2025, Accelerate released Conducting Cost Analysis of Tutoring Interventions: A Guide for Program Providers and Researchers and an accompanying cost tool to support more consistent, high-quality cost analyses across tutoring and educational interventions.
Accelerate shared the cost tool directly with our grantees and partnered with two research teams – Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) at Harvard University and the Center for Research and Reform in Education (CRRE) at Johns Hopkins University. CEPR and CRRE both led randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of Accelerate grantees during the 2024-25 school year, and implemented the cost analysis tool as part of these program evaluations.
Based on feedback from users, including tutoring providers and research partners, and Accelerate’s own field testing, we’ve released version 2.0 of the cost tool with several key enhancements:
- Excel & Google versions: We’ve created an Excel version of the cost tool as a companion to the existing cost tool in Google Sheets.
- Tutorial video: The tutorial video provides users with a visual introduction to the cost tool, complementing the existing user guide and tooltips embedded in the cost tool.
- Scheduled vs Actual dosage: The tool now distinguishes between scheduled and actual tutoring dosage – improving transparency around program implementation and supporting the calculation of a program’s cost-effectiveness that is more aligned with real-world implementation. Scheduled dosage is used to calculate cost-efficiency. Actual dosage is used to calculate tutoring efficiency. Cost-efficiency and tutoring efficiency are both components of cost-effectiveness. You can read more about these metrics in our May 2024 and February 2025 reports.
- Improved usability: To improve the overall usability of the cost tool, we have clarified user tooltips, streamlined the calculation of summative metrics (e.g., cost-effectiveness) and planning scenarios, incorporated more complete citations to data sources (e.g., pricing schedules), and refined the presentation of summary statistics (e.g., cost to society in Table 2 and cost to school in Table 3 in the “Outputs – Summary Costs” tab of the cost tool).
Beginning in the 2025–26 school year, program-specific cost analysis will be formally incorporated into all program evaluations of Accelerate grantees. Doing so will enable a direct assessment of program-specific cost-effectiveness and will provide greater clarity into the return on investment (in terms of student learning) of each of Accelerate’s grantees.
Accelerate will continue to refine the cost tool to improve its use and usability for the field by leveraging field-based feedback from our network of providers and research partners. Our goal is to make rigorous cost analysis a standard part of program evaluations to inform the decision-making of education leaders and other key stakeholders.
Resources
Want to learn more about implementing the cost tool in your work? Reach out to Matthew Steinberg, Accelerate’s Managing Director of Research and Evaluation (matthew.steinberg@accelerate.us).
