5 Ways to Use Apex Learning Tutorials in Summer Programs

Strong summer programs are essential as educators continue to address significant and ongoing gaps in learning. Striving to meet a wide range of student learning needs, district and campus leaders are including summer options to accelerate students to on-grade learning, remediate gaps in prerequisite knowledge, and prepare for college entrance exams.

Implementing Apex Learning Tutorials in Summer Programs

Here, we will look at five ways Apex Learning Tutorials by Edmentum, our 6–12 modular, on-grade acceleration and remediation solution, can help meet these summer learning goals.

Math Readiness

Math achievement has significantly fallen across every percentile, even for usually high-performing students. Strengthen your students’ math readiness with Apex Tutorials in your summer programs to provide targeted instruction, practice, and assessment so that students receive the support they need to master math skills and attain grade-level readiness.

Consider, for example, implementing Tutorials with your struggling Algebra 1 learners so that they receive individualized remediation exactly where they need it and gain mastery of the essential skills to access the continuing complexity of high school math.

Tutorials are designed for differentiated learning—one concept or skill at a time, identifying skill gaps that may prevent a student from being successful. Use this as one of your summer programs as an opportunity to simultaneously fill gaps and promote understanding of math instruction for your struggling students so that they may enter the new school year ready to reach their goals.

Accelerated Learning

Many students continue to demonstrate gaps in the prerequisite skills they need to access next-grade content, and we know these students would benefit from extra help. So that these gaps do not become barriers to grade-level material, let’s consider how to accelerate learning with summer programs.

Students who receive individualized prerequisite skill remediation applied to on-grade content using Tutorials have shown great success with accelerating learning in middle school and high school.

Middle school Tutorials and high school Tutorials align with this model, identifying each student's readiness for grade-level skill, standard, or test objective and providing targeted remediation, which is immediately applied to on-grade instruction to close gaps and allow students to access grade-level content with individualized supports.

Tutorials adjust to meet each student’s needs with an intentional design that includes assessment, remediation, and on-grade instruction—all with embedded support.

The “Learn It,” “Try It,” “Review It,” and “Test It” modular structure of Tutorials begins with short prerequisite skills pretests that lead to individualized, scaffolded support so that student learning can rapidly grow to grade-level content with differentiated teaching one concept and skill at a time.

Freshman Transitions

More students fail 9th grade than any other grade level. Because this is such a crucial year, many district leaders incorporate explicit, holistic intervention for new freshmen as they plan for summer and the upcoming school year so that these new high school students can make a successful transition.

Your summer programs to bridge these students over should include a strong, evidence-based solution such as Apex Learning Tutorials to help students begin 9th grade with the prerequisite knowledge needed to navigate new course content competently.

College Readiness

For incoming juniors and seniors, summer is an opportune time to study for college entrance exams coming up in the fall. Consistent weekly practice will not only bring students to exam readiness but will also have a positive effect on next-grade content because students are interacting with concepts already learned and will not experience the typical “summer slide”.

College readiness Tutorials are designed specifically to meet each student’s test readiness needs with targeted instruction aligned to each of the ACT®, SAT®, ACCUPLACER®, and TSI Assessment tests.

They offer personalized and focused instruction that helps districts meet important college test readiness goals and helps students build depth of knowledge, confidence, and higher-order skills through instruction and practice of skills essential to the test.

In a three-year study, the instructional approach of college readiness Tutorials was proven to be effective, with pretest to posttest gains of 26 percentile points on ACT® Tutorials and gains of 23 percentile points on the SAT®.

Prepare for End-of-Course (EOC) Exams

As exam results come in, you’re likely facing a population of students who were unsuccessful and require remediation to demonstrate mastery on retake exams. With Tutorials, students get comprehensive exposure to essential prerequisite skills and on-grade instruction aligned to the end-of-course (EOC) test they are preparing for.

The reporting in Tutorials maps back to testing categories for a clear data picture of ongoing strengths and needs. Tutorials’ personalized learning targets the skills and concepts that each student needs for test success.

Tutorials allow students to build the foundational and tested skills they need to be confident when approaching these exams.

The power of Tutorials lies in their structure, which scaffolds to meet the individual needs of each student, filling learning gaps and providing accessible on-grade and on-course instruction to enhance learning for all students.

Explore our article Planning for Summer Learning for insights on designing effective summer programs to boost academic achievement, explore enrichment topics, and prevent learning loss over the break.