New Research Casts Doubt on the ‘Summer Slide’
June 17, 2019
By: Youki Terada
Source: Edutopia
Every summer, we hear about the dangers of “summer slide”—kids going to the beach, watching television, or playing video games, all the while forgetting most of what they learned during the school year. The real story, as it turns out, is a lot more complicated, according to a recent article by a researcher in Education Next.
The idea of summer learning loss—of a growing learning gap between students who took summers off, and those who continued to study—was most famously recorded in test scores from Baltimore in the 1980s, and appears to be supported by common sense: If kids spend their summers playing, they’ll fall behind those that spend their time studying. But according to Paul T. von Hippel, a policy professor at the University of Texas at Austin, there are flaws with the research on summer learning loss that should make us question the universal truth of summer slide.