As summer approaches, it’s not just the promise of sunny days and outdoor adventures that should be on parents’ minds, but the break from school can also bring about a concerning yet common issue known as summer learning loss, or the summer slide. When it comes down to the skills of math and reading, students seem to have a significant decline, and this learning loss can be detrimental to their future. But fear not; there are proactive steps we can take to prevent this slide and keep young minds engaged and thriving over the summer months. For these steps to work, we must first recognize what summer learning loss is as well as how it affects the students in question.
Understanding Summer Learning Loss
According to the Northwest Evaluation Association, test scores tend to stagnate or even decline during the summer break since, “on average, test scores flatten or drop during the summer, with larger drops typically in math than reading.” Without regular reinforcement, information stored during the school year can fade, leaving students struggling to retain essential concepts. During the school year, students feel the heat and pressure of quickly remembering for long periods of time. Once that stress is over, their minds relax, letting go of some of the lessons they learned earlier in the year. In turn, this makes it hard for teachers since students lose grasp of the basics during the summer months, resulting in either a crash course or slowly relearning to retain the concepts once more.
The Impact on Students
Learner’s research highlights the widespread nature of summer learning loss, with as many as “84% of students [who] demonstrated summer slide in math” between 5th and 6th grades. Math is such a crucial concept that is taught in school, and to forget this during the summer break can be detrimental in the following semester. Even in younger years, this can occur. Scholastic references, “A more recent study of children in 3rd to 5th grades also showed that students lost, on average, about 20 percent of their school-year gains in reading and 27 percent of their school-year gains in math during summer break.” This can create an imbalance in the classroom, with some students feeling prepared while others struggle to keep up.
The imbalance in proficiency over the summer is noticeable when looking at a key difference between students: family income. As the Colorado Department of Education reports, “summer learning loss accounts for two-thirds of the 9th grade achievement gap in reading between students from low-income households and their higher-income peers.” This goes to show how summer learning loss or the summer slide can happen to anyone yet can be targeted to a certain demographic. With this unusual environment, students can feel unprepared and may struggle from the start, letting their stress build early. We cannot just ignore this issue of summer loss. We need to address its effect on how students come back to school in the fall.
Moreover, Education Week’s findings reveal that many students opt out of reading altogether during the summer, further exacerbating the problem. They claim that “as students approach summer vacation, they have a confession to make: While 77 percent agree that summer reading will help them, 20 percent report not reading any books over the summer.” Let’s face it. Most student learning comes from books, one way or another. It may be a novel, magazine, or even a textbook. The academic books provided are too essential for students to give up. In the summer, when forgetting school lessons is so common, students who lack reading are more susceptible to the summer slide than if they were exposed to reading more often.
Addressing the Root Causes
To combat summer learning loss, we must first understand its underlying causes. One major factor is student disengagement during the summer break, leading to high chances of the summer slide. Health Day’s survey shows that a significant percentage of students experience negative emotions related to learning, which will turn out no differently during the summer. The blog and survey speak volumes and connect student disengagement with the summer slide. This blog references “surveying nearly 22,000 students nationwide, researchers found that 75% expressed boredom, anger, sadness, fear or stress.”. If education feels like a chore or is associated with stress and boredom, it’s no wonder students are reluctant to engage in learning activities over the summer. Why should students keep trying to learn if it is within their power to stop? As mentioned previously, students have read several books during the school year, so to retain their learning, it would still be best if they continued during the summer. This would help with both the disengagement and other parts of the summer loss.
What’s wrong with books anyway? It opens up a whole new world of information and stories. It may be that one major reason why summer learning loss exists is due to students being unwilling to pursue academics in their own time. Reading is the most common learning resource they have, yet they do not take advantage of it. This may be due to students building a negative stigma against reading right after the required reading list in school. It’s simple economics; if the opportunity cost for all the other fun activities a student could do over the summer is reading educational books, that cost is severely low, and frankly, not many students will swap their activities just to learn. Finally, textbooks make you learn new things, not stabilize old ones. If students are constantly learning new things, they will never grasp the basics or the prior ideas. This makes a lot of students repel themselves from books during the summer.
Practical Strategies for Prevention
So, what can parents, caregivers, and educators do to prevent summer learning loss? We want to retain the academic skills students learn during the school year. Here are some practical tips:
1. Create a Summer Reading Plan: Encourage children to read regularly over the summer, and make it fun by letting them choose books that interest them. Give them an incentive to read, whether educational or not, reading of any sort still helps keep the student’s mind fresh.
2. Engage in Hands-on Learning: Encourage activities that promote learning through play, such as science experiments, art projects, and cooking activities. You can teach them life skills over the summer as well as get them in the mood to learn and retain academic skills.
3. Utilize Educational Resources: Take advantage of educational websites, apps, and programs that make learning enjoyable and interactive. When kids think of things as games, they tend to be more excitable and willing to learn.
4. Set Aside Daily Learning Time: Schedule dedicated time each day for learning activities, whether it’s reading, practicing math skills, or exploring new subjects. Consistency is key; taking time to brush up on skills builds stronger habits to tackle anything the new school year presents.
5. Encourage Exploration: Plan educational outings and field trips to museums, zoos, and other places of interest to spark curiosity and encourage active learning. After all, curiosity leads to innovation and critical thinking; getting to branch out of the typical educational environment can have positive effects.
6. Foster a Positive Learning Environment: Create a supportive and encouraging atmosphere where learning is celebrated and mistakes are seen as opportunities for growth. Keeping your child safe and happy makes them comfortable enough to learn from any experience they can!
Conclusion
It is always embarrassing to have to ask the most simple questions at the start of the new year. However, in recent years, we have learned that if we have some sort of interest in something, the summer offers us the opportunity to explore it and pursue it. This even extends to education. Looking back right before I graduate, I can see how much I loved math. This became of great interest to me with algebra, geometry, and even calculus. As such, the past few summers, I took this interest with me to break.
Using my passion as a motivating factor, I found several resources online during countless summers to help me with this learning loss. I hoped my academics would improve and stabilize throughout the upcoming year. I loved watching YouTube videos and reading textbooks on the math lessons I would learn that year. But most of all, one book, “Mathematical Girls,” would be the thing that made me want to keep learning. With any sort of motivating factor, anyone can overcome summer learning loss and pursue their education to the next level.
Summer learning loss is a real concern, but with proactive efforts and a focus on engaging and enjoyable learning activities, we can prevent the slide and set students up for success when they return to school in the fall. By working together as parents, caregivers, and educators, we can ensure that every child has the opportunity to thrive academically, regardless of the season.
Sources:
https://www.cde.state.co.us/cdelib/summerslide
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/students-increasingly-are-not-reading-over-the-summer-poll-finds/2019/05
https://www.healthday.com/health-news/child-health/tired-stressed-and-bored-study-finds-most-teens-hate-high-school-754549.html
https://www.learner.com/blog/summer-slide-statistics#:~:text=Between%2070%25%20and%2078%25%20of,demonstrated%20summer%20slide%20in%20math.
Summer learning loss: What we know and what we’re learning
https://www.scholastic.com/parents/books-and-reading/raise-a-reader-blog/summer-slide.print.html