This website uses cookies as well as similar tools and technologies to understand visitors experiences. In addition, high-quality instruction (promoted through careful hiring and professional development) by teachers who have recently taught the sending or receiving grade contributes to positive student outcomes, as does providing that instruction in orderly summer sites with low levels of physical fighting or bullying. Help us keep doing that. It was targeted at 3,000 low-income children in five cities in 2013. Preventing summer learning loss: Results of a Even though the server responded OK, it is possible the submission was not processed. One study found a positive, statistically significant association between prior teaching experience and reading outcomes.10 Specifically, it found that students who had summer teachers who had just taught either their sending or receiving grade performed better than other students on a fall reading assessment. Methodology: Priority is given to the most rigorous study types, such as randomized controlled trials and quasi-experimental designs, as well as to correlational designs, descriptive analyses, mixed methods and literature reviews. Zvoch and Stevens, Summer School Effects in a Randomized Field Trial.. research on the effectiveness of summer school/summer bridge programs on reducing "summer The server responded with {{status_text}} (code {{status_code}}). See Jonathan Guryan, James S. Kim, and Kyung Park, Motivation and Incentives in Education: Evidence from a Summer Reading Experiment, NBER Working Paper Series, no. Supplemental This story aboutsummer school programswas written by Jill Barshay and produced byThe Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused oninequality and innovation in education. When Bree Dusseault, a researcher at the Center in Reinventing Public Education, read through districts summer plans, she observed that they were largely planning a virtual version of traditional summer school.. Your email address will not be published. (back to the article).

Twenty percent of the kids never showed up. In addition to tinkering with traditional summer school models, Kim suggests that school systems consider adapting aspects of home-based educational models, in which some form of teacher instruction or feedback can be combined with reading materials at home. (2011). 7.



15. We have not evaluated the The evidence from previous programs doesnt apply here.. In this new reality, were either going to be all virtual or partially virtual. 4. Furthermore, simply offering a program does not guarantee it will benefit students. Researchers expected that students in more orderly sites would have better outcomes because they and their teachers would be less likely to be distracted by misbehavior.18 To evaluate student discipline and order in the district programs they studied, they created a scale for each site within each district based on teacher survey data. Zvoch and Stevens, Summer School Effects in a Randomized Field Trial.. Harvard education professor James S. Kim praised the RAND study as one of the most rigorous studies thats ever been done on the topic of summer school.

learning loss. Executive Summary. ).9 At the end of the summer, the intervention was effective only for motivated students (as measured by baseline surveys), and the use of incentives actually widened the achievement gap between motivated and unmotivated students. The results from Project READS also suggest that sending students books matched to their reading levels and interests over the summer with the expectation that they will read them is not enough. King, who is now the president of Education Trust, a nonprofit that advocates for low-income students, and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a national teachers union, jointly argued for additional funding for summer schooling in an April editorial in the Hill newspaper.

Summer learning programs are a promising way to narrow the gap. Please read our guidelines for more information. Furthermore, researchers found large positive effects of an intense summer literacy program on students reading outcomes.4 The program used daily small-group (three to five children), research-based instruction. The authors also offer implications for policy on narrowing the achievement gap between students. To sum up, programs with small classes and significant resources provide teachers with more time to work individually with students and to create greater opportunities to differentiate instruction based on student needs. Or there was a football camp they wanted them to do for one week. Worse, only half the kids came back for the second summer. They do read alouds. For each reference, we provide an abstract, excerpt, or summary written by the study's

Some are doing that really well, Dusseault said. James S. Kim and David M. Quinn, The Effects of Summer Reading on Low-Income Childrens Literacy Achievement from Kindergarten to Grade 8: A Meta-Analysis of Classroom and Home Interventions, Review of Educational Research 83 (2013): 386431. How Can Teachers Make the Most of Professional Learning in the Summer? 6. Please contact the developer of this form processor to improve this message. Summer Programs Could Help, Russian Mercenaries, Online Extremism, the Commercial Space Market: RAND Weekly Recap, Summer for All: Building Coordinated Networks to Promote Access to Quality Summer Learning and Enrichment Opportunities Across a Community, The Big Lift Evaluation: Research Findings Five Years In, Summer Learning, America's Middle Class, Waking Up After the Pandemic: RAND Weekly Recap, Commit Now to Get Summer Programming Right, Getting to Work on Summer Learning: Recommended Practices for Success, 2nd Ed. She is particularly interested in quality improvement and systems change. Jennifer McCombs is a senior policy researcher and the director of the behavioral and policy sciences department at Rand and a professor at the Pardee Rand Graduate School. Campbell, L. O., Sutter, C. C., & Lambie, G. W. (2019). 9. In one study, researchers observed and evaluated instructional quality for each classroom in their study.12 Their analysis found a positive association between quality of instruction and better student performance in reading. slide." *For more on bullying, see Understanding Bullying Behavior in the Winter 20162017 issue of American Educator. It was marketed to third graders as a free summer program for two summers in a row and, not surprisingly, many more families applied than there were spots. The problem, the researchers discovered, was attendance. Researchers tested two different treatments. The Hechinger Report is a national nonprofit newsroom that reports on one topic: education. In the absence of a structured school setting, struggling students also need continued support during the summer. Thats important. Kim and Quinn, Effects of Summer Reading. See also, National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction (Washington, DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). Doug Rohrer and Harold Pashler, Recent Research on Human Learning Challenges Conventional Instructional Strategies, Educational Researcher 39, no.

Lindley, S., Giles, R. M., & Tunks, K. (2016). This weekly recap focuses on Russia's use of mercenaries, understanding how extremist movements operate online, trends in the commercial space market, and more. But the school districts all agreed to the same basic structure: five or more weeks long, a full-day from roughly 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. so parents could work and three hours of reading and math instruction in the morning with certified teachers and a class size of 12 or fewer students. But Dusseault hasnt seen examples of schools testing new ways of teaching online, or trying new ways of mixing in-person with computerized instruction. In order to recruit and hire the right teachers, researchers recommend developing rigorous selection processes to recruit motivated teachers and, to the extent possible, taking teachers school-year performance into consideration.11 They also stress the importance of hiring teachers with not only grade-level but also subject-matter experience and, if possible, familiarity with the students. Research shows that summertime can widen the achievement gap between students from low-income families and their more-affluent peers.

The authors consider how policy environments affect school districts' attempts to scale and sustain quality summer programs. Research shows that summer breaks contribute to income-based achievement and opportunity gaps for youth. Similarly, researchers recommend that school districts plan for programs to run at least five weeks and schedule 6090 minutes of mathematics per day to maximize effectiveness.25 Because instructional time on task is reduced due to student absences and inefficient use of time during the day, researchers suggest special efforts to promote consistent attendance, maintain daily schedules, and ensure teachers maximize instructional time in the classroom. ), The Summer Slide: What We Know and Can Do About Summer Learning Loss (New York: Teachers College Press). Such programs may also be particularly beneficial during the summer, when teachers have much less time to get to know the students in their classrooms. Subscribe to the weekly Policy Currents newsletter to receive updates on the issues that matter most. The evidence suggests that many types of summer learning programs have the potential to reduce summer learning losses and perhaps create learning gains. I would recommend reading aloud from kindergarten to middle school, said Kim. The authors examine participation rates, kindergarten readiness, and third-grade outcomes of children eligible to participate in The Big Lift, a preschoolthird-grade initiative to designed to boost reading proficiency.

King Jr. called for summer distance learning as one way to mitigate the months of lost learning from school closures. Covering Innovation & Inequality in Education. Think about what teachers do in middle school to get kids interested in reading texts they otherwise might not read by themselves. Many were low achieving and behind grade level. Catherine H. Augustine et al., Getting to Work on Summer Learning: Recommended Practices for Success (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2013). This weekly recap focuses on helping students recover learning losses, fighting Russian trolls, racial disparity in unemployment benefits, the race for AI leadership, and more. question. preventing summer slide OR preventing summer loss OR summer slide OR summer learning She is skilled at planning and. The authors distill lessons about implementing and improving summer learning programs gleaned from a six-year study in the five urban districts participating in the National Summer Learning Project. As we try to translate classroom based interventions to an online format, we dont know how they will impact kids, said Kim. 20. Cooper et al., Making the Most of Summer School.. to high school or from elementary to middle school? Harris Cooper et al., Making the Most of Summer School: A Meta-Analytic and Narrative Review, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 65, no. Candidate, Pardee RAND Graduate School. Or grandma was coming into town. learning effect on fourth grade students' reading scores. McLeod, R., Kim, S., Tomek, S., & McDaniel, S. (2019). Catherine H. Augustine is a senior policy researcher and quality assurance manager at Rand. 4 (1984); Nancy Karweit, Should We Lengthen the School Term?, Educational Researcher 14, no. Academic learning time is more predictive of student achievement.22 Furthermore, research also suggests that spaced practice (once a day for several days), as opposed to one long, concentrated lesson (all day long for just one day), appears to be more effective in facilitating learning.23 When focusing on boosting students literacy skills, researchers recommend that students receive at least two hours of teacher-directed daily instruction blended between whole-group and small-group (three to five students) lessons and that the program meet regularly during the week (four to five times) for at least five weeks.24. This is an opportunity to pause and pilot and practice approaches that might serve them well in the fall , said Dusseault. We are committed to advancing these principles through community engagement, organizing, collective bargaining and political activism, and especially through the work our members do. This research brief summarizes how policy environment affects school districts' attempts to scale and sustain quality summer programs. In June 2020, the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a think tank based at the University of Washington, posted a survey of summer school plans around the country. She cited Miamis efforts to target different kids with different interventions, for example, summer reading camp for some elementary school children but motivational support for kids who hadnt been logging into virtual school in the spring. In the first, students were supplied with books to read over the summer aligned to their skills and interests. Summer programs for students that also offer learning opportunities for teachers might help make up for lost time. As an enticement, afternoons were filled with fun camp activities from rock climbing and sailing to cooking and theater but these were also run by teachers, many of whom were certified in special education for children with disabilities. Other considerations include the target population and sample, including their relevance to the question, generalizability, and general quality. Zvoch and Stevens, Summer School Effects in a Randomized Field Trial; and Keith Zvoch and Joseph J. Stevens, Identification of Summer School Effects by Comparing the In- and Out-of-School Growth Rates of Struggling Early Readers, Elementary School Journal 115 (2015): 433456. 1 (2000). Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. On June 10, 2020, as the U.S. Capitol remained partially shut down amid the coronavirus pandemic, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held a virtual hearing on what schools ought to do. 16. I would still recommend that districts, if theyre going to provide a summer opportunity remotely, make sure that they do it for enough hours, days and weeks to make a difference, Augustine said. In addition to the importance of recruiting qualified teachers, the teachers instruction of the curriculum is important. Jill Barshay writes the weekly Proof Points column about education research and data, covering a range of topics from early childhood to higher education. One small exception was in math but the initial fourth-grade improvement in math scores was short-lived and it dissipated by the start of fifth grade. In efforts to ensure high-quality instruction, researchers recommend anchoring summer literacy programs in an evidence-based curriculum;14 providing professional development to teachers;15 tying small-group instruction explicitly to learning goals;16 and providing teachers with instructional support, such as coaching, during the program.17. Only slightly more than half of the 100 U.S. districts the organization is tracking were planning to offer summer school for elementary and middle school students in 2020, as of the latest update, on June 9. Notify me by email when the comment gets approved. Students also benefit from individualized and aligned instruction and class sizes smaller than 20 students. {{#message}}{{{message}}}{{/message}}{{^message}}Your submission failed. Drawing upon decades of experience, RAND provides research services, systematic analysis, and innovative thinking to a global clientele that includes government agencies, foundations, and private-sector firms.

When summer programs are targeted to needs, intentionally designed, and well attended, they produce positive outcomes in math and reading. recommendations. But he does encourage school systems to try new things this summer and track the results closely so that we can all learn from them. Speaking over a video feed from his home in Silver Spring, Maryland, former Obama administration Secretary of Education John B. RAND researchers examine approaches and strategies for summer learning initiatives and their effects on student outcomes. After two consecutive years of high-quality summer school costing more than $1,300 per student each summer, the kids who went to summer school didnt do any better academically or by social-emotional measures than the kids who didnt. I could find only one large, well-designed study, published in 2016, that tested how much kids actually learn in voluntary summer school programs. The following factors are considered when selecting references: REL Mid-Atlantic serves the education needs of Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The results were disappointing. But these programs need federal support, and they require early planning. Get important education news and analysis delivered straight to your inbox. Augustine said she was pessimistic that virtual lessons over the summer will work as well as face-to-face ones. Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get stories like this delivered directly to your inbox. 11. She taught algebra to ninth-graders for For the schools that are holding summer school, instruction in most cases will be exclusively virtual over the internet. National Summer Learning Association (NSLA): U.S. Department of Education, At-Home Activities: Academic Databases (e.g., EBSCO databases, JSTOR database, ProQuest, Google Scholar), Institute of Education Sciences Resources. author or publisher. Laboratory Mid-Atlantic administered by Mathematica Policy Research. Of those 12, the five studies that met these criteria had large statistically significant, positive effects on students learning, and the seven studies that did not meet the criteria had no statistically significant effect on students learning. This report presents data from the first nationally representative survey of teachers about their summer professional learning opportunities and data from a descriptive study of BellXcel Summer, an academic summer program model for students. Required fields are marked *. (Summer school is more prevalent for high schools students to retake failed classes.) Finally, the Project READS work also tested whether incentives to read over the summer enhanced students summer reading habits and comprehension. That allowed researchers to create an admissions lottery and compare the academic and social-emotional outcomes of the 3,000 third-graders who got spots with the 2,400 who didnt. Consistent attendance is crucial not only for school-year learning but for summer learning as well.19 Researchers did not find differences in program effectiveness between summer programs that did and did not monitor attendance, so tracking attendance, while a good policy, is likely insufficient to increase attendance.20 To promote consistent attendance, researchers recommend setting enrollment deadlines, establishing a clear attendance policy, and providing field trips and other incentives for students who attend.21 They also found that it is not necessary to disguise academics to boost attendance: the district with the highest attendance rate in the study ran the most school-like program, with the most explicit academic instruction. Those who did only attended summer school 75 percent of the time despite the fact that the summer school programs in all five cities provided free transportation and food. Government. Your email address will not be published. 6 (1985): 915; and Nancy Karweit and Robert E. Slavin, Time-on-Task: Issues of Timing, Sampling, and Definition, Journal of Educational Psychology 74 (1982): 844851. Is there any research on the effectiveness of summer school/summer bridge The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. Jennifer Sloan McCombs et al., Ready for Fall? American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO. /content/admin/rand-header/jcr:content/par/header/reports, /content/admin/rand-header/jcr:content/par/header/blogPosts, /content/admin/rand-header/jcr:content/par/header/multimedia, /content/admin/rand-header/jcr:content/par/header/caseStudies, School Districts Still Struggled in Year Three of the Pandemic, Superintendents Have High Job Satisfaction and Normal Turnover Rates, U.S. Jobs Rebounded, but Not for Everyone, The 'Right to Life' Will End Up Killing Women, 988 Mental Health Hotline: Connecting People to Care, Embracing Intrinsic Cultural Advantages in Innovation, Improving Psychological Wellbeing and Work Outcomes in the UK, Getting to Know Military Caregivers and Their Needs, Planning for the Rising Costs of Dementia, How to Make Sure Your Summer Learning Program Is Effective, Teachers Have Lost Out on Professional Development. The impact of a summer



We have prepared the following memo with research references to help answer your This brief summarizes an examination of the potential value of academic summer programs for students that also offer professional learning opportunities for teachers. If you can get kids to show up, summer school with only lessons in the morning can be as effective as regular school. transition with CAT camp. How can we use what we know about summer learning to help kids in the age of COVID-19? programs on reducing "summer slide" particularly for students transitioning from middle school By Andrew McEachin, Catherine H. Augustine, Jennifer McCombs, By Daniel P. Shepardson and Andrew S. Hirsch, By Richard Beach, Jeff Share, and Allen Webb, By Linda Friedrich, Willard Brown, and Heather Howlett, Paraprofessionals & school-related personnel, Safe and welcoming public schools for all, Bringing a Literacy Focus into the Science Classroom. Furthermore, researchers examined voluntary and at-home literacy programs that used research-based instruction, such as guided repeated oral reading, that related readings to students prior experiences and explicitly modeled strategies for students.13 Programs that included these practices had significantly larger positive effects on students reading outcomes than programs that did not use such instructional practices. This implies that there is no best target population of students for summer programming. Charles W. Fisher et al., Teaching Behaviors, Academic Learning Time, and Student Achievement: An Overview, in Time to Learn: A Review of the Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study, ed. But the type of instruction, hours and curriculum vary wildly, depending upon which city or town you happen to live in. Those final results are expected to be published later in 2020 but Im not anticipating a surprise turnaround. Researchers at RAND, a nonprofit research organization, had designed a sort of ideal summer school experience drawing upon expert opinions and academic theories. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. 3. For example, researchers tested whether students who were given resources meant to mimic school-year learning opportunities outperformed students who were just given basic prompts to read books over the summer.8 They found that an approach that included a scaffolded summer reading intervention and prompts to read over the summer increased the amount of time students spent reading and improved their comprehension, relative to students who were either just mailed books home or not given any treatment (e.g., no scaffolding or books). This seventh report in a series presents longitudinal findings on the effectiveness of voluntary summer learning programs in five school districts. One study found that summer programs with class size capped at 20 students were more effective than others in producing achievement gains.1 In another study, researchers found no statistically significant relationship between class size and program quality, but they found positive effects when small classes were combined with significant program resources (defined as class sizes of no more than 13, at least four hours of participation per day, and at least 70 hours of total participation).2 They analyzed 12 studies with enough detail to investigate whether program resources mediated students learning. But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. This may be because prevailing class sizes across the five studied districts were all small, ranging from an average of eight to 14 students per teacher. Reference Search and Selection Criteria. Researchers generally distinguish between allocated time (the time on the school calendar for a given content area) and academic learning time (the amount of time students spend working on rigorous tasks at the appropriate level of difficulty). We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Learn More{{/message}}, {{#message}}{{{message}}}{{/message}}{{^message}}It appears your submission was successful. The references are selected from the most commonly used research (They did not find a relationship between quality of instruction and student performance in mathematics.)