Lansing School District Pilot: Early Signals of Accelerated Learning

In Spring 2025, Grokkoli conducted a small pilot with Lansing School District, working with SPED learners performing at a pre-K to 3rd-grade level who were receiving supplemental math support. While the sample size was modest (13 students with at least 10 learning sessions), the outcomes were both promising and instructive.

Learning Progress

Learning rate graph

Among the 13 active SPED students:

  • 8 learners demonstrated accelerated growth, progressing at 2x or more the typical classroom learning rate, putting them on track to catch up by multiple grade levels in a short period.
  • 2 learners showed slightly faster-than-average progress, with potential to close learning gaps over a longer timeline.
  • 2 learners progressed just below the average rate, but may still be falling behind less rapidly than before.
  • 1 learner experienced significantly slower progress; this case is now helping guide targeted system improvements.

These trajectories were calculated using Grokkoli's in-platform learning data and reflect authentic patterns of engagement and mastery.

Note: Unlike systems that track correctness immediately after instruction or prompting, Grokkoli measures whether students can answer correctly within a spaced-repetition context, without support, and only after time has passed. This helps ensure the learning has truly stuck, rather than being reconstructed in short-term memory. As a result, our benchmarks reflect durable understanding, not just momentary success.

Benchmarking Against HIT Programs

Top-performing high-impact tutoring (HIT) programs typically rely on:

  • 3+ sessions per week (~30 minutes), or
  • 4–5 shorter sessions/week (15–20 minutes for younger learners)

Our pilot did not consistently reach that frequency, making the observed gains even more noteworthy. Still, with ~75% of students showing accelerated progress — particularly among SPED learners — Grokkoli's outcomes are in line with leading HIT programs, at a fraction of the cost and staffing overhead.

Teacher Feedback

Educator response has been overwhelmingly positive:

  • One teacher who joined the pilot midstream reported that Grokkoli had "transformed [her] SPED class", giving her more time for direct instruction than ever before.
  • Another was so encouraged by early results that she invited two colleagues to join the pilot mid-way.

Next Steps

Based on these outcomes, Lansing has invited Grokkoli back to run a larger-scale pilot with ~200 students in Fall 2025.