Summer reading loss, also known as the “summer slide” occurs when students are unable to maintain the literacy skills they acquired during the school year (Allington & McGill-Franzen, 2003; Becknel, Moeller & Matzen, 2017; Mraz & Rasinski, 2007).
When many students return to school in September, they are nearly a month behind where they were in the spring (Becknel et al., 2017). This is because children do not spend as much time engaging in educational activities, primarily reading, when school is not in session, causing them to lose valuable skills (Lundstrom, 2005).
[PSNotebook]. (2014, June 30). Summer lost: stopping the summer slide (web series trailer) [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngipEVjSRAA
Implications
“Too many children are losing too much ground over summer vacation, especially low-income children...This is not a school problem, this is a community problem, and we’ve got to organize ourselves to solve that” ( Smith, 2011, p. 62).
Children from low-income families demonstrate the steepest decline in reading achievement from June to August (Smith, 2011). One reason for this is low-income children have access to fewer high-quality texts compared with children from middle-class families (Allington & McGill-Franzen, 2008). Summer reading loss also compounds throughout a child’s educational career, making it difficult for low-income children to catch up (Allington & McGill-Franzen, 2003). Read more about the achivement gap here.
When students return to school in the fall with decreased reading abilities, valuable time and resources and spent trying to rebuild lost skills, and academic achievement is at risk (Allington & McGill-Franzen, 2013; Berlinski, 2018; Smith, 2011).
Summer reading loss costs schools at least $1,500 per student each year, which adds up to over $18,000 during a child’s K-12 career (Smith, 2011).
In addition to financial strain, “9 in 10 teachers spend at least three weeks reteaching lessons at the start of the school year” (Berlinsky, 2018, p. 19). This monopolizes time that could be spent teaching new material and moving students forward in their learning. To lessen the burden of reteaching on schools, summer reading loss must a major area of focus for the system of education.
Preventing Summer Slide
One way to reduce summer reading loss is to increase students’ reading volume, as children who spend time reading during the summer are at less of a risk for experiencing summer reading loss (Compton-Lilly, Caloia, Quast & McCann, 2016).
The volume of independent reading that takes place during the summer has been found to be the best predictor of whether a child will experience a loss or gain of reading skills (Allington & McGill-Franzen, 2003; Becknel et al., 2017).
Allington et al. (2010) go as far as to state, “...reading activity [is] the only factor that [is] consistently correlated to reading gains during the summer” (p. 414). To put it simply, if children are to improve, or at least maintain their reading skills during the summer, they need to spend time reading.
The effectiveness of independent reading in mitigating summer reading loss can be largely explained by the self-teaching hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, if students spend time reading large volumes of quality texts independently, they are forced to develop new strategies and skills, especially when encountering unfamiliar words (Allington & McGill-Franzen, 2003).According to the logic of the self-teaching hypothesis, the more children read, the more skills they acquire, and the better they become.
Unfortunately, the reality is that most children spend very little time reading outside of school. In fact, one study concluded 90 percent of fifth graders spent less than one percent of their free time reading, while they spent 33 percent of the time watching television (Calkins, 2001).