source: http://ideas.time.com/2013/07/01/do-kids-really-have-summer-learning-loss/
They appear every summer as reliably as the stories about shark attacks: a rash of articles raising the alarm about the “summer slide,” or the loss of learning that grade-school students experience over the months when classes are out. Concern about this leads many a parent to stock up on workbooks and flash cards, or to enroll their children in educational camps and enrichment programs. But is the summer slide really the seasonal disaster that we’ve been warned about? A close look at the research reveals a more complicated picture.
For kids from middle- and upper-middle-income households, for example, the summer slide doesn’t exist at all — at least in terms of reading skills. Affluent children actually make slight gains in reading over the summer months, according to an analysis of 13 research studies led by Harris Cooper, professor of education at Duke University. Meanwhile, lower-income kids lose more than two months of reading achievement over the same period. (The math skills of both affluent and less-affluent kids tend to decline over the summer break.)
Even among underprivileged students, however, the summer slide is not universal. A study published last year in the Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk reported that “not all low-SES [socio-economic status] students experience summer learning loss.” The authors, led by Johns Hopkins University sociologist Stephanie Slates, identified a sample of poor children from Baltimore who gained as much as their higher-SES peers in reading or math during at least three of the four summers of elementary school.
What makes these “outliers” different? Their parents, the investigators found, are significantly more likely than other low-income parents to take their children to the library during the summer and to check out books while there. The parents of these “exceptional summer learners” also read to their children for longer periods of time, and are more likely to check their children’s homework and have higher expectations for their children’s conduct grade during the school year — “types of parental involvement that could well carry over into the summer months,” the researchers note.
