For decades, education researchers have warned about “summer slide,” where students forget some of what they learned over the previous school year during summer vacation.
A systematic review of 39 studies published in 1996 found summer learning loss equaled about one month of classroom learning, and students tended to regress more in math skills compared to reading skills. It also found that students from middle- and upper-class families improved their reading skills over the summer, while students from lower-income families regressed.
But newer research is calling into question these findings. A recent longitudinal study published in the journal Sociological Science tried to replicate summer learning loss studies. The researchers identified one major problem with the early studies on summer learning loss: The tests given before and after summer vacation often tested different material, so they didn’t provide a consistent way to measure changes in learning over summer.
This paper, published last year, compared data from three different standardized tests given to students during the 2010s. Each test used a model called adaptive testing, which estimates each child’s current skill level while controlling for the difficulty of each test question.
Analyzing the new data, the researchers asked how much reading and math skills children lost over summer vacations, and whether these gaps depended on gender, race, or socioeconomic status.
Two Conclusions
On the whole, the researchers found only two conclusions were consistent across all three data sets: Large gaps in students’ scores were already present when children began elementary school. This demonstrates that much of learning inequality begins before kindergarten, and during summer vacations, the vast majority of children make little or no learning progress, but they do learn quickly during the school year.
Beyond these two points, there were no conclusions about summer learning that replicated across all three standardized tests. Reading losses appeared dramatic on one test, but milder or nonexistent on the others. Similarly, math skills dropped significantly on two of the tests but were nonexistent on the third.
There was just as little agreement on more complex questions concerning inequality in learning. Across tests, there were no consistent results concerning the gaps between children in low-poverty and high-poverty schools; between white, Black, Asian, or Hispanic students; or between boys and girls.
An earlier study published in the journal Phi Delta Kappan found a different variable at play. In it, researchers analyzed data from more than 3.4 million students in all 50 states who took the same reading and mathematics assessments between the 2016-17 and 2017-18 school years.
The analysis still found that students lost some of what they learned the previous school year. (The typical student loses one to two months of learning in reading and one to three months of learning in math.) But it demonstrated that the strongest predictor of whether a student would experience summer gains or losses was how much progress the student had made in the previous academic year. Students who learned more during the school year were more likely to lose ground during summer break.
In addition, race and ethnicity only accounted for 1 percent of summer learning loss in the new study. Students in higher-poverty schools did show significantly more loss during the summer in later elementary and middle school, but only by about one week of school learning.
The evidence is clear: Children do forget skills and knowledge learned in the previous school year, and research is telling us more about the factors that contribute to those losses. But if families and educators encourage kids to stay engaged in learning throughout the summer, students may not only maintain but also improve their knowledge.
