OnYourMark Education: Accelerating Literacy Through Virtual Tutoring

In a landscape where literacy rates among young students are a growing concern, OnYourMark Education emerges as a beacon of hope, offering a high-impact virtual tutoring program designed to bolster foundational reading skills. With a focus on kindergarten through second-grade students, OnYourMark delivers personalized instruction grounded in the science of reading, aiming to bridge the literacy gap and set students on a path to lifelong success.

The State of Literacy and the Need for Intervention

The statistics paint a concerning picture: in 2022, only 33 percent of fourth-grade students nationwide performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level on the reading assessment. This highlights the urgent need for effective interventions that can address the foundational literacy skills crucial for academic success. For students in under-resourced schools, the gap is even wider, underscoring the importance of targeted support to bridge this divide.

OnYourMark Education: A Virtual Tutoring Solution

Established in 2021, OnYourMark Education provides virtual, individualized, high-dosage instruction focused on building foundational early literacy skills. The program is designed to complement existing literacy instruction in schools, offering a targeted approach to support struggling readers.

Program Structure and Delivery

OnYourMark Education delivers high-impact virtual tutoring for 20 minutes a day, four days a week, to students in kindergarten through second grade. A consistent, trained tutor remotely delivers a literacy curriculum focused on phonics, phonemic awareness, and fluency. These sessions are typically conducted in small groups or one-on-one, using a video conferencing platform during the school day.

Curriculum and Instruction

The program utilizes high-quality curricula informed by the science of reading that centers on key literacy skills such as phonics, phonological awareness, and fluency. OnYourMark leverages continuous assessment data in the form of bi-weekly progress monitoring. These are shorter, formative assessments that are aligned to the benchmark measures and enable tutors to adapt instruction and provide real-time feedback to teachers about a student’s progress. If progress monitoring indicates a student has surpassed grade-level on their target skill, tutors are able to create new lesson sprints for the student’s next target skill.

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OnYourMark understands that traditional high-impact tutoring models aren’t suitable for younger students with shorter attention spans, so they have adapted to shorter, more frequent tutoring sessions for grades K-2.

Tutor Recruitment, Training, and Support

The organization recruits, trains, and manages tutors from across the country, matching them with schools seeking to increase students’ reading ability. Tutors who contract with OnYourMark are passionate about working with children and helping them reach their literary goals. Tutors come from a diverse background, including freelancers, college students, retired and current educators.

OnYourMark carefully screens every tutor applicant to provide the highest quality tutors for our students, accepting roughly 1 in 10 applicants. All OnYourMark tutors receive 24 hours of initial training plus weekly coaching and professional development. Pre-service training for new tutors is about 20 hours while returning tutors engage in about 4 hours of pre-service training.

OnYourMark recruits and hires tutors, as well as provides the initial tutoring training and ongoing professional development focused on content knowledge, building relationships, and effective delivery of the intervention.

The Science of Reading: A Foundation for Success

OnYourMark’s tutoring is grounded in the science of reading with a focus on foundational literacy skills. Children’s brains are not naturally wired for reading, and teaching them to read effectively requires the ability to continuously track progress and make adjustments throughout their reading journey. At OnYourMark Education, tutors use research validated methods, like Amplify’s mCLASS Intervention curricula and the University of Oregon’s Center on Teaching and Learning’s DIBELS® 8th Edition literacy assessment, to guide children on their path to literacy. Amplify’s phonics based method teaches children to blend the sounds of individual letters or groups of letters and decode unfamiliar or unknown words by sounding them out, and the DIBELS assessment ensures students are on the right track, by conducting regular assessments that pinpoint their reading level and determine if they’re ready to move forward. OnYourMark’s approach is proven to work by keeping students continuously challenged and encouraged by their tutors.

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Key Literacy Skills

OnYourMark focuses on the fundamental reading skills to build the knowledge students need to succeed academically and beyond the classroom. Obsessing over these small skills ensures that our students achieve big growth. The core components include:

Phonemic Awareness
Phonics
Fluency
Vocabulary
Comprehension

Impact and Results: Evidence-Based Success

The impact of OnYourMark Education’s virtual tutoring program has been examined in multiple studies, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving students' literacy skills.

Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) Findings

In 2022, Overdeck Family Foundation was the sole funder of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) designed to understand the potential impact of OnYourMark’s virtual tutoring on student learning. Conducted by a team of researchers from Stanford University led by Susanna Loeb, the study examined over 2,000 students across 12 schools. About half of the students were randomly assigned to receive tutoring from OnYourMark while the other half were randomly assigned to receive instruction as usual.

Study findings revealed that one-on-one virtual OnYourMark tutoring had a positive impact on students’ early literacy skills, as measured with an assessment called the DIBELS. OnYourMark had the largest effects on kindergarteners’ knowledge of letter sounds and first graders’ decoding skills. Researchers concluded that impacts on these domains translated into as much as 24 extra days of learning letter sounds for kindergartners and 51 extra days of decoding for first graders.

Texas Schools Study (2022-2023)

The impact of OnYourMark was examined in a randomized controlled trial implemented across 12 Texas schools during the 2022-23 academic year. Delivered virtually during the school day, the program provided four 20-minute tutoring sessions per week from September to May, focusing on foundational literacy skills such as phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, and decoding. The diverse study sample (93% economically disadvantaged, 34% Black, 66% Hispanic) included 2,085 kindergarten through second-grade students: 510 randomly assigned to receive one-on-one tutoring, 570 to two-on-one tutoring, and 1,005 to a business-as-usual control condition.

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Across the K-2 sample, students who were assigned to receive OnYourMark tutoring scored significantly higher than their peers in the control group on the DIBELS (effect size = +0.08), with the 1:1 students driving the gains (effect size = +0.12). Results were also significant for students scoring well below benchmark at baseline (effect size = +0.11), with those in the 1:1 setting performing even stronger (effect size = +0.15). When looking at individual grades, the significant gains were registered among the 1st grade students assigned to receive 1:1 tutoring, with OnYourMark students significantly outperforming those in the control group on the DIBELS (effect size = +0.20) and also scoring higher on the MAP (effect size = +0.16), for an average effect size of +0.18 across the two measures.

Key Outcomes

Highlights from the 2024-2025 School Year:

Number of students: 3,600+ students
88% of students achieved exceptional growth in at least one critical literacy skill.
54% exceeded growth expectations, with 33% reaching grade-level proficiency-a 21-point jump in just one year.
We focus on students who struggle the most: 80% of our students started the year well below or below benchmark.
For students who started the year below or well below the benchmark, an impressive 88% met or exceeded growth expectations in at least one individual literacy skill.

Research Publication

Robinson, C. D., Pollard, C., Novicoff, S., White, S., & Loeb, S. (2024). The effects of virtual tutoring on young readers: Results from a randomized controlled trial. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 01623737241288845.

Data-Driven Approach and Continuous Improvement

OnYourMark leverages continuous assessment data in the form of bi-weekly progress monitoring. Using validated benchmark assessments such as DIBELS® in addition to biweekly formative assessments, tutors customize their instruction to meet students’ individual needs and celebrate their growth. This way, OnYourMark not only provides targeted intervention but also accelerated skills mastery. These are shorter, formative assessments that are aligned to the benchmark measures and enable tutors to adapt instruction and provide real-time feedback to teachers about a student’s progress. If progress monitoring indicates a student has surpassed grade-level on their target skill, tutors are able to create new lesson sprints for the student’s next target skill.

Enhancing Literacy with Data-Driven Innovation. In the Fall of 2023, OnYourMark brought highly impactful virtual reading instruction to 11 school districts across seven states and is expanding to even more districts across new states this spring. Partnering with Pearl and the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford, OnYourMark is optimized to collect and analyze their data in order to enhance their approach. OnYourMark leverages continuous assessment data in the form of bi-weekly progress monitoring.

Mindy Sjoblom, Founder and CEO of OnYourMark, describes herself as ‘data-obsessed,’ and praises Pearl for improving their operational efficiency by consolidating data and enabling easy interpretation of their findings. Their collaboration with Pearl is marked by their mutual dedication to partnership and commitment to improving student learning outcomes.

Addressing Cost-Effectiveness and Sustainability

OnYourMark’s RCT is the first of its kind to test the impact of virtual tutoring on young learners. The results point to the potential of virtual instruction to reach more students, whether they are in rural schools or schools that are struggling to recruit and hire tutoring staff, as well as potential insight into how high-dosage tutoring can become more cost-effective and sustainable in the future through the use of technology.

Bolstered by this evidence, OnYourMark continues to innovate on ways to improve the cost-effectiveness of high-quality tutoring. In 2023, the organization launched a pilot with Overdeck Family Foundation grantee Illuminate Literacy building on previous Foundation-funded research into the effectiveness of blended tutoring models.

Partnering with OnYourMark

OnYourMark Education provides virtual, individualized, high-dosage instruction focused on building foundational early literacy skills. The program is grounded in the science of reading and partners with schools as a complement to the literacy instruction already in place.

Students in need of additional support are typically selected for the OnYourMark program in partnership with the school based on the DIBELS assessment and other school data. Students use individual devices to meet virtually 1:1 with a consistent tutor four times a week for twenty-minute sessions in the classroom.

Testimonials

“I appreciate the individualized support that scholars receive through the program. and the ongoing communication that the OYM team provides to the school’s leadership team.”~ Elizabeth Dunn, Catalyst Schools
After meeting with the OnYourMark team and learning more about their results to date, the curriculum they use, and the infrastructure they have, I was confident that they were the right partner for our district.~ Dana Talley, Chief Academic Officer, Lincoln Parish Schools, Ruston, Louisiana
“The best part of tutoring at OnYourMark is the ongoing support from the coaches! This helps to fully equip tutors with the necessary resources and guidance we need to strengthen the students’ reading skills!”~ Wanda Stine, Tutor
Partnering with OnYourMark to provide virtual early literacy tutoring has been a critical part of ensuring our students get access to resources, like private tutoring. We view it as such a high priority that we made it part of the school day to ensure our students receive one-on-one support and instruction in communities where those resources aren’t readily available.~ Yasmin Bhatia, CEO, Uplift Education
“OYM is committed to teaching kids to read based on the Science of Reading, a proven method I’ve seen work time and time again.”~Lauren Lazo, Tutor
“OnYourMark’s approach is data-driven. They build their tutoring using DIBELS data, which provides us with the baseline information we need to measure impact on scholars. This exceptional commitment to data-driven instruction highlights them as one of our most thoughtful and deliberate instructional partners.” ~ Dr. Remy L. Washington, President, Uplift Education
“The best part of tutoring at OnYourMark is the relationships I get to create with my students! I love seeing their eyes light up when they start to really understand a concept. I also love knowing that I am fighting educational inequality one lesson at a time!”~Priya Sommers, Tutor
Their communication is always great. The OYM team is always there to support my campus and our needs. They clearly understand how a school operates and everything we have to do in order to get tutoring going. I recommend them over any other vendor with which I’ve worked.~ Frances Maisonet, Dean, Uplift White Rock Hills
“I love working with children and helping them reach their highest potential in learning. It is rewarding to see them learn new skills and experience success. I look forward to each session.”~ Darlene Catabia, Tutor
I appreciate the ongoing support, regular check-ins, data transparency, and willingness to accept feedback. I have witnessed strides in making the program as user friendly as possible for scholars, which is contributing to their growth. OnYourMark and their team is clearly dedicated to a level of elevated expectations.~ Shere Taylor, Teacher, Uplift Summit
“I love working with kids and wanted to find a way to do so that was flexible for my hours and availability. I love the scheduling system at OnYourMark that allows me to teach students while also getting my Master’s degree.”~Riordon Turner, Tutor
“OnYourMark has been a critical partner for us to support our struggling readers. The tutoring sessions are highly engaging and student data consistently reflects accelerated growth towards grade level benchmark.

Empowering Education Through Collaborative Support

The OnYourMark Education team acknowledges and values the hard work teachers bring to the classroom. They understand that introducing a new curriculum can be time-consuming, which is why they are so focused on ensuring effective and successful methods are in place to support students on their literacy journey. “We’ve built a business around the understanding that teaching is a demanding profession,” said Sjoblom.

A Call to Action: Invest in Early Literacy

The window is narrow. Don't let budget constraints cost you long-term success. Savvy districts are investing early. Are you?

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