A long-ago rock song said it first: “There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.”
In the 1970s, Barbara Heyns (1978) discovered that over the summer, disadvantaged students lost a lot more of what they had learned in school than did advantaged students. Ever since then, educators have been trying to figure out how they could use time during the summer to help disadvantaged students catch up academically. I got interested in this recently because I have been trying to learn what kinds of educational interventions might be most impactful for the millions of students who have missed many months of school due to Covid-19 school closures. Along with tutoring and after school programs, summer school is routinely mentioned as a likely solution.
Along with colleagues Chen Xie, Alan Cheung, and Amanda Neitzel, I have been looking at the literature on summer programs for disadvantaged students.
There are two basic approaches to summer programs intended to help at-risk students. One of these, summer book reading, gives students reading assignments over the summer (e.g., Kim & Guryan, 2010). These generally have very small impacts, but on the other hand, they are relatively inexpensive.
Of greater interest to the quest for powerful interventions to overcome Covid-19 learning losses are summer school programs in reading and mathematics. Studies of most of the summer school programs found they made little difference in outcomes. For example, an evaluation of a 5-week, six hour a day remedial program for middle school students found no significant differences in reading or math (Somers et al., 2015). However, there was one category of summer school programs that had at least a glimmer of promise. All three involved intensive, phonics-focused programs for students in kindergarten or first grade. Schachter & Jo (2005) reported substantial impacts of such a program, with a mean effect size of +1.16 on fall reading measures. However, by the following spring, a follow-up test showed a non-significant difference of +0.18. Zvoch & Stevens (2013), using similar approaches, found effect sizes of +0.60 for kindergarten and +0.78 for first grade. However, no measure of maintenance was reported. Borman & Dowling (2006) provided first graders with a 7-week reading-focused summer school. There were substantial positive effects by fall, but these disappeared by spring. The same students qualified for a second summer school experience after second grade, and this once again showed positive effects that faded by the following spring. There was no cumulative effect.
Because these studies showed no lasting impact, one might consider them a failure. However, it is important to note the impressive initial impacts, which might suggest that intensive reading instruction could be a part of a comprehensive approach for struggling readers in the early grades, if these gains were followed up during the school year with effective interventions. What summertime offers is an opportunity to use time differently (i.e., intensive phonics for young students who need it). It would make more sense to build on the apparent potential of focused summer school, rather than abandoning it based on its lack of long-term impacts.
All by themselves, summer programs, based on the evidence we have so far “Ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.” But in next week’s blog, I discuss some ideas about how short-term interventions with powerful impacts, such as tutoring, pre-kindergarten, and intensive phonics for students in grades K-1 in summer school, might be followed up with school-year interventions to produce long-term positive impacts. Perhaps summer school could be part of a cure for the school year blues.
References
Borman, G. D., & Dowling, Ν. M. (2006). Longitudinal achievement effects of multiyear summer school: Evidence from the Teach Baltimore randomized field trial. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 28, 25-48. doi:10.3102/01623737028001025
Heyns, B. (1978). Summer learning and the effect of schooling. New York: Academic Press.
Kim, J. S., & Guryan, J. (2010). The efficacy of a voluntary summer book reading intervention for low-income Latino children from language minority families. Journal of Educational Psychology, 102, 20-31. doi:10.1037/a0017270
Somers, M. A., Welbeck, R., Grossman, J. B., & Gooden, S. (2015). An analysis of the effects of an academic summer program for middle school students. Retrieved from ERIC website: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED558507.pdf
Schacter, J., & Jo, B. (2005). Learning when school is not in session: A reading summer day-camp intervention to improve the achievement of exiting first-grade students who are economically disadvantaged. Journal of Research in Reading, 28, 158-169. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9817.2005.00260.x
Zvoch, K., & Stevens, J. J. (2013). Summer school effects in a randomized field trial. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 28(1), 24-32. doi:10.1016/j.ecresq.2012.05.002
Photo credit: American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action (CC BY-NC 4.0)
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