Students Helping Students: Implementation of Elementary Math Facts Fluency Interventions by High Schoolers
Trained high-school students deliver explicit-timing math interventions just as well as grad students, giving schools a no-cost staffing fix.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Powell et al. (2023) asked high-school students to run one-minute math sprints with elementary kids.
The teens got a short training package. Then they timed, scored, and charted each first-grader’s answers.
Grad students did the same lessons with similar kids. The team later compared the gains.
What they found
Elementary pupils improved their math-fact speed no matter who ran the timer.
High-school helpers produced the same jump in scores as the grad-student group.
How this fits with other research
The result lines up with Thompson et al. (1974), who first showed fifth graders can teach younger kids arithmetic.
It also echoes Gladstone et al. (1975): a quick BST loop lets teens deliver real behavior-change lessons.
Kapoor et al. (2025) pushed the same precision-teaching math work onto Zoom and saw bigger gains. Their remote format extends Powell’s in-person model, proving the method travels.
Stocker et al. (2021) look different at first glance; sixth graders ran their own timing sheets and still got better. Self-management seems to work, yet Powell’s adult-timed version keeps the accuracy checks some kids still need.
Why it matters
You can stop waiting for scarce grad-student hours. Train a few reliable high-school volunteers with a one-hour BST package, give them a timer and a data sheet, and you have a free fluency clinic that works as well as expert delivery. Start Monday by asking the honors society for three volunteers and run a 5-min timing station during math centers.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Many schools face barriers that hinder access to services, including limited funding and staff trained in evidence-based interventions. In particular, rural schools must provide targeted intervention to promote academic growth and narrow achievement gaps despite these barriers. One seldom-considered solution to ease the resource costs in the provision of intervention services is to provide high school students with the training and supervision necessary to carry them out. Thirty elementary students participated in an explicit timing intervention administered by either a high school student or graduate student in school psychology. A 2 × 2 mixed factorial ANOVA found significant growth from pre- to post-test with no effects of interventionist education level. These findings imply that school-based interventionists may be able to expand the reach of their practice by recruiting and training older students to carry out interventions.
Contemporary School Psychology, 2023 · doi:10.1007/s40688-023-00469-1