Kids still have a little more than a month of summer vacation before the new school year starts, but educators hope kids don't experience the "summer slide." That term is used to describe the tendency for young students to lose academic skills over the summer months, often due to a lack of repetition or reinforcements.
Michelle Storie, an assistant professor and director of the school psychology program at SUNY Oswego, said it is more than just a few lessons that can be lost.
“Sometimes you can see anywhere from a couple months to even half of a year decline in academic skills when students are going back to the next school year,” Storie said.
For young students, subjects that require repetition of skills, like math and reading are typically the most interrupted. Even if skills are built up during the academic year, Storie said schools’ benchmark tests show the biggest decline after summer break.
“It’s very common that we will see kids perform their best in the spring and when they come back in the fall, even though the kids are older and you would expect, you know, even though they’ve moved to the next grade, you would expect the trajectory to keep going up, oftentimes we see a decline in the spring performance of the previous grade to the fall performance of their next grade,” Storie said.
She said this is not unusual.
“If students are not practicing the skill on a regular basis, or not involved in academic activities over the summer, you see a decline when kids come back to school,” Storie said. “And that’s pretty common.”
While the summer slide is not new, Storie said schools need to provide more resources than ever to combat learning loss and other roadblocks in the post-COVID-19 classroom.
“It’s more crucial than ever that schools are providing lots of interventions and supports both for the academic pieces and the social/emotional pieces, you know, to really deal with the impact of the pandemic,” Storie said. “Because even though it is a couple years removed, those academic weaknesses are still persisting.”
Storie said quality online resources can be found online at the following websites:
https://ufli.education.ufl.edu/resources/teaching-resources/instructional-activities/
