Pupils lose academic ground over the long summer break, and the loss is claimed to be larger for poorer children, widening gaps.
Heyns documented it in 1978, and Cooper's 1996 meta-analysis put the average loss at about a month of schooling. The strongest version came from Baltimore's Beginning School Study, where the reading gap between richer and poorer pupils more than tripled by eighth grade, with all of the growth appearing to happen over summers. Von Hippel and Hamrock showed in 2019 that much of that pattern came from the way older tests were scaled.
In practice
- A district funds summer school to close its income gap, and finds that the gap in its own spring and autumn scores barely moved over the break.
- A child comes back in September rusty on long division, which is real, and a few weeks of practice restore it.
- Possible explanations
- Candidate explanations are simple forgetting over a long break, differences in what children do during the summer, and measurement, since tests scaled in older ways can manufacture the appearance of loss.
- In its favour
- Some loss appears on some tests, and the mechanism is plausible for skills that need practice, such as arithmetic.
- Against it
- Findings often fail to replicate in recent data, much of the original pattern came from test scaling now considered artefactual, and whether summers widen gaps by income is unsettled.
- Standing
- Workman, von Hippel and Merry found in 2023 that findings on summer loss often fail to replicate even in recent data. Some loss appears on some tests; whether summers widen gaps by family income is unsettled.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Learning & Education
- Essay
- What works in learning, and what schools can and cannot change