Jury is out on summer learning loss

Whether kids experience serious decay in learning during the summer break will, according to research on the topic, vary according to how the kids spent their time, who did the research and how teachers approach their new classes in September.

Most of us eventually forget more than we retain from our own years of formal education, but given a refresher course in, say, Euclidian geometry, we would recall that a hypotenuse is not an animal in Africa or that a scalene triangle has nothing to do with a nasty skin outbreak.

In any case, the results of learning studies have generally agreed that for the more content-heavy subjects, as much as a half can be lost to immediate recollection from one grade to the next, with details of math and science suffering especially.

That’s why most teachers, especially at the high-school level, devote at least part of their September program to “reviewing what we know already” and then segue “what we did before” into “what we are going to do now.”

The reality is that as the school year winds down, many children look forward to a summer filled with fun and recreation, which probably needs to be balanced with the fact that students can experience “academic atrophy” over the summer.

The design of our North American and Canadian school year is left over from the past, when children were expected to help with summer-season family tasks, such as plowing, planting and picking.

It is a safe assumption that students beginning the next academic year will be, on average, one month behind where they finished in the spring. After all, kids have had their minds on other things and come back to school refreshed from just having been kids for a while.

Some claim that instruction during the summer has the potential to avoid some learning-content losses, but a review of the literature on summer learning loss and summer learning programs, coupled with data from ongoing programs offered by districts and private providers, is inconclusive.

Somewhere in the world right now, students are hard at work in school. Across the globe, students and their academic years and days come in a variety of forms.

There are semesters, trimesters, quarter (four-term) systems and schools in session anywhere from 180 to 200 days each year.

School days span 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. with a brief break for lunch in most of Canada. In China, the day is from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. with a two-hour lunch.

None of this has been proven to correlate conclusively with student achievement. All research agrees that quality of teaching is the only thing that affects that.

The idea of year-round schooling has been around for a while. It is more popular in the U.S. where there are more than 3,000 year-round schools. In Canada, about 100 schools have switched to a “balanced calendar” year-round schedule.

The B.C. government has introduced the amendments to the School Act that, starting in the 2013-14 school year, allows local school districts to set their own schedules, so we might see some school boards tentatively go their own way with the different calendars.

Teachers are split on whether a twomonth summer is a better antidote to burnout in a demanding profession, and parents sometimes struggle to match school schedules for older and younger kids in different schools with their own work schedules.

All well and good, but let’s not forget that what most of us remember about summer has little to do with quadratic equations, the proper construct of an ode or a sonnet, or even why Boyle’s law is important.

What we do remember are long, light-filled days and afternoons by the creek or lake or in the neighbourhood swimming pool.

We remember the freedom to roam on our bikes, to pick berries, to play pickup games with friends and to play outside until dark or play inside until bedtime.

Those leisurely summer days are so deeply embedded in our collective consciousness that it would be difficult to replace all that with school.

Life becomes serious soon enough.