What Two Harvard Studies Taught Us About Summer School

While students across the United States are back in classrooms this fall semester, two researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education have shared what they are learning about summer school and its impact on learning loss.

Summer school is far from a new learning pathway, but in the wake of districts struggling to combat post-pandemic learning loss, summer curriculums have increasingly been studied as a way to prevent the “summer slide” of learning loss between spring and fall instruction periods.

As Professor Thomas Kane argues, summer school can be a key piece to the post-pandemic academic recovery plan for school districts trying to make up for lost learning time.

Kane, who serves as faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research, has studied pandemic learning loss in depth and argues educators should “be honest with parents about where kids are right now.” Mainly, that students have still not fully recovered from pandemic learning loss, and interventions are required to make up that ground.

In a working paper Kane published with the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), researchers studied 400,000 students across eight large U.S. school districts and found “modest but significant improvements” in student math achievement after attending summer programs.  

Math Gains, On Repeat

“Our findings suggest summer programs, despite their modest impacts, are a viable, reliable, and scalable option for accelerating student learning in math,” the paper states, noting that even programs offering less than the recommended number of summer school hours had yielded positive results.

Interestingly, the study did not find the same level of impact on reading achievement, noting a “generally small and statistically indistinguishable” improvement in reading levels in the districts studied. The paper noted there are many different kinds of summer reading interventions, which may play a role in their overall effectiveness. Overall, though, the researchers noted that summer school instruction of math in particular “hold promise for improving math achievement at scale.”

One noteworthy finding in the CALDER study was that repeat summer school attendees seemingly benefited more from the programs compared to first-time summer school students, but that further research would be necessary to determine if multiple summers in the classroom “produces long-term gains.”

Teachers Lead The Way

Another reading study published by a group including HGSE Assistant Professor Phil Capin showed students benefit more from teacher-led reading programs than home-based programs.

Capin, along with researchers at the University of Nebraska at Kearney and Durham University in the United Kingdom, published an analysis of 13 different studies where students grades 6–12 deemed at-risk or with reading difficulties were offered various interventions.

As the paper notes, students at risk of academic underachievement often see learning growth during the school year that’s comparable to their peers. But studies have shown struggling readers see “significant learning loss during the summer months, averaging a decline of 3–4 months of academic progress and knowledge.”

The paper examined the many ways various schools try to combat that learning loss with summer reading interventions and found “it was the interventions that not only provided academic resources, but actual academic instruction of some type to the students that saw the largest impact on student outcomes.” In other words, that students reading along with teachers and a curriculum in a classroom saw more benefits than those that were student-led or home-based.

Overall, the study notes that more research into summer reading interventions is necessary to get a fuller picture of the impact summer reading programs can have on student achievement, as at-risk or struggling readers are often at increased risk of dropping out of school altogether.