Everyone involved in education knows about the summer slide students get: they lose some of their knowledge from the prior school year and start off the start of the next school year a little farther back than the books say they “should” be at.
So, that happens every year. But this year of course, things are even more intense with the COVID-19 virus and all the ancillary difficulties in dealing with a global pandemic. Even more knowledge is likely to be lost, or it never was learned in the first place. And that replacement learning is not going to be caught up all at once – we are likely looking at spending time this summer, in the next school year, and next summer just to get kids back to where they would have been with just summer slide. It’s a lot, but as with anything else, knowing about problems in advance lets us start thinking about how to address them.
Check out our excerpt of this article below, and you can read the whole thing right here.
“More than 50 million schoolchildren in the United States alone have spent the past several months not sitting in class, not studying with friends, not working through math problems with a teacher by their side. Educators are bracing for a “COVID slide” in performance when—or if—students return to school in the fall.
A decade of research at RAND provides some insight into what that will look like, and what school districts can do to get students back on track. Researchers have been studying how to prevent learning loss during what was, until now, the biggest break on the school calendar—summer vacation.
Their advice to parents and school leaders: Some kids are in danger of getting left behind; they’re the ones who can least afford it; and it will take more than a standard school year to help them catch up.
“What teachers are going to face in their classrooms when school resumes is a lot of variation in what students are ready for, much more variation than they’re used to,” said Jennifer McCombs, a senior policy researcher and director of the Behavioral and Policy Sciences Department at RAND. “School leaders will need to provide more quality after-school and summer programming to get kids caught up.”…
“A typical nine-month school year won’t be enough to address the slide, Augustine said. School districts will have to find ways to keep more kids learning through next summer. She and McCombs have some guidance for school leaders as they weigh their options, drawn from the longest and most-comprehensive study of summer learning programs ever conducted.
Their team tracked more than 5,000 children in five large school districts who were about to become fourth-graders in the summer of 2013. Almost all of them were eligible for the national school lunch program, an indicator of low family income. More than 3,000 of the children were invited to attend free, high-quality summer day camps that mixed academic seat time with fun activities like swimming or art.
The following fall, those children did better on their math tests, compared with the control group, with an average gain equal to around 15 percent of a typical school year. After two summers of programming, children who attended at least 20 days of the program performed better in mathematics, reading, and social and emotional outcomes. Those results persisted through the school year.
The study, funded by The Wallace Foundation, concluded that the evidence of a benefit was strong enough that the programs would qualify for federal funding.”
Read the rest of this article here!