Sliding out of summer learning loss

The last day of the school year may mark the beginning of three months of summer fun, but it also marks the beginning of learning loss, when students lose some of the skills they learned during the academic year. By attending proactive and preventative summer school programs, however, students can regain learning ground, according to ongoing research from UW–Madison.

For nearly 100 years, researchers have documented that during the summer months all children – regardless of their socioeconomic backgrounds – experience summer learning loss, also known as the summer slide. While math skills slip for all children, reading skills slip primarily for children from low-income families.

“Previous research shows that the differences in summer learning rates are especially salient for low-income students,” says Geoffrey Borman, a UW–Madison assistant professor of educational administration. “Most disadvantaged students lose up to one-third of what they learned during the school year.”

Researchers, including Borman, hypothesize that this loss is due, in part, to a lack of learning resources in the home.

As each summer passes, this group of students slides farther behind the group of more economically advantaged peers. Borman says, “If you add up those differences in summer learning rates over the years, the gap widens considerably.”

Despite years of research investigating the effects of summer learning loss, Borman says few studies have tested the effects of summer programs specifically designed to combat these learning losses, primarily because few such programs exist. Most summer school programs, Borman explains, are aimed at remediation – helping students who have already fallen behind. When Borman and his colleagues surveyed 100 of the largest school districts in the country in 1999, they learned that only one district offered a program developed specifically to prevent the summer slide.

“The real piece of evidence that’s missing,” he says, “is what would happen if low-income children attended a summer school program designed to prevent the summer slide.”

Borman is beginning to provide this evidence through his work with urban students in Baltimore, Md., who attend a summer program called Teach Baltimore. Community-based and established in 1992, Teach Baltimore provides an academically intensive summer program to Baltimore City children. One of its main goals is to prevent summer learning loss among low-income students. Inner-city children who attend the program receive three hours of quality reading and writing instruction and participate in a series of hands-on science, math, art, drama and recreation activities. At least once each week, they leave the classroom to learn in other settings, such as the Washington Zoo or the nearby campus of Johns Hopkins University (JHU).

To determine if Teach Baltimore meets its mission of averting the summer slide, Borman and his colleagues at JHU tested the reading achievement of youngsters who attended the program during three consecutive summers beginning in 1999, when the students had just completed either kindergarten or first grade. The researchers measured achievement by testing the students’ learning accomplishments at both the start and finish of each school year.

The final analysis won’t be complete until after this summer, but Borman says the results look promising so far. For instance, after the first summer of the study, the students who had participated in Teach Baltimore, compared to those who had not, escaped the summer slide. In fact, they even gained academic ground.

“Instead of losing one-third of what they learned the year before, they gained one-third,” says Borman, who stresses that whether this finding was sustained over the three years has yet to be determined.

What Borman hopes his study ultimately will provide, he says, is “quality evidence of what summer school can do for those kids at risk for summer learning loss.”