Denver Public Schools ('21-22)

Cignition partnered with Denver Public Schools (DPS) in the 2021-22 school year to offer online math tutoring for grades 4 -12 students. Our math tutoring was offered to schools by the District as part of their “Transition Priorities,” set by the leadership as a response to the challenges and opportunities created by the COVID-19 pandemic (Understanding District Priorities). Our agreement with DPS was a performance-based contract, which ties compensation to student outcomes (EdWeek - Performance-Based Contracts). The implementation included Transformative Social-Emotional and Academic Learning (TSEAL) practices designed to support DPS’s Social-Emotional and Mental Health transition priority (Understanding District Priorities). These practices were developed in partnership with DPS and implemented by our staff and tutors. 

During the school year, student enrollment grew over 400% from initial to full deployment of services, ultimately serving 1,000+ students. When asked about critical factors in choosing a tutoring vendor, Bridgett Bird, Senior Manager of Academic Programs and Planning at DPS commented, “We don’t want to have a ton of vendors. Scalability [is a critical factor.]” We launched services in Denver on October 4, 2021, with sessions at 3 schools, 201 students, and 52 groups. (Tutoring groups are constituted of 3 or 4 students, homogeneously grouped by math proficiency, to facilitate Cignition’s collaborative, inquiry-based learning approach.) By March of 2022, we had served 19 schools, 1069 students, and 272 individual groups. At the end of the school year, we had provided 15421 math tutoring sessions by 196 different tutors. We added a technology helpline for teachers, parents, students, and a local site administrator to assist schools in their implementation. 

DPS is known for individual school autonomy (Colorado Chalkbeat), with district leaders embracing the “portfolio model.” (Chalkbeat - Portfolio Model)  As a result, we provided a variety of implementation models across the district. Specifically, it was part of the grade-level coaching and tutoring provided as a school choice, an initiative of DPS’s priority, “Accelerating Learning by Re-envisioning Education.” School autonomy enabled the staff at each school to envision a unique way to use our services, including:

And, although all deployments did not lend themselves to a comprehensive set of student performance measurements, we saw an average of 12.1% absolute gain score increase across every student who completed a pre-and post-diagnostic assessment. 

Each implementation was crafted through weekly meetings with school personnel, the DPS Expanded Academic Learning (EAL) team, and Cignition staff. The focus remained consistent: a high dosage of grade-level content. Group size was overwhelmingly set at 3 or 4 students, though exceptions were made for special cases. We designed content aligned with DPS’s scope and sequence, and teachers identified unique learning progressions for their students. From this experience, our engineers developed a tool to allow teachers to select specific content areas for upcoming tutoring sessions.

Bird said, “It’s hard to tell on a piece of paper, but adaptability has proven itself to be important in this new world of high-impact tutoring. One thing that has been greatly appreciated on our part, with Cigniton, is their ability to adapt and pivot.”

Because of the demands made by economies of scale, public education is often reduced to cookie-cutter approaches. Students, teachers, and districts are not served well because they are offered “one-size-fits-all” solutions. In contrast, the Cignition/DPS partnership demonstrated our ability to adapt our services, personalize our tools to match district needs, and scale quickly, all while providing excellent, effective math tutoring. We offer a different experience, a bespoke solution developed in concert with our partners.

Senior Manager Bird summed up the relationship this way: