Education research provides parents with simple tricks to help kids keep learning all summer
It seems inevitable. School ends, summer begins, and kids start their annual ride down the long and slippery summer slide. Interest in summer slide or summer setback is not new. This phenomenon — whereby kids forget over the summer months some of what they learned during the school year — has been researched for decades, but there is some new thinking around how to actually combat it.
The situation is especially serious for low-income students who may not have access to summer learning and activity resources. A report from the National Center for Education Statistics found that after kindergarten, 83% of children from low-income households have no activities or regular care scheduled over the summer months. What’s more, while 38% of affluent students attend summer camp programs, only 7% of poor students do.
Although nothing beats summer school when it comes to keeping summer slide at bay, there are a number of free, research-based activities that parents and students can undertake to keep their brains sharp over the summer months.
As the parent of an 8-year-old girl, I’m on alert for summer slide. I am also a cognitive scientist who has spent time studying cause and effect in academic performance, particularly in math and science. One of the best things parents of school-age children can do is make doing math and science a part of everyday life — regardless of whether students happen to be in the classroom or not.
In one study my research team and I conducted, parents and their first-grade children replaced a bedtime story with a fun math problem that they could solve together using an app called Bedtime Math (you can download it free online). Just by making math part of a daily ritual (particularly when presented in an interesting way), students’ math scores improved across the school year — and this was especially so for kids whose parents were most nervous and anxious about math.App or no app, school year or summer, parents who integrate daily math talk into their children’s lives can likely help stave off the worst of summer slide. It could be something as simple as pointing out the math that goes into measuring the ingredients for morning pancakes or calculating the amount of time until the next scheduled bus arrives.
It’s also important to keep the gears turning for high school and college students during the summer. At Barnard College, we encourage students to use summer as a time to reflect and refuel but also as an opportunity to use what they learned in the classroom in a new setting, such as an internship or working in a laboratory. Case in point, this summer we have almost 200 Barnard students participating in our 10-week Summer Research Institute, where they work alongside faculty in biology, chemistry, environmental science, and more in labs across the city. Not only are students keeping the wheels turning between semesters, but they are also developing skills and making valuable connections that eventually help land their first professional job — a foot in the door for a bigger, better career.
Adding a playful, educational component to summer trips and activities or jumping into a math app together doesn’t have to be a huge lift. Even simply encouraging older students to get involved in stimulating internships and volunteer opportunities can have a big academic payoff. The single most important thing for supporting young, curious minds in the coming months is to keep their brains active — and to have fun while doing it.
