Children lose educational ground during summer vacation
Johns Hopkins sociologist Karl Alexander
Johns Hopkins sociologist Karl Alexander and his colleagues tracked the academic progress of nearly 800 Baltimore students from first grade until age 22.
They found that 65 percent of the achievement gap between poor ninth-graders and their more advantaged peers was due to wasted summers that lacked stimulation and learning.
Forty percent of the children in the study left high school without diplomas, Alexander said. “These early patterns of out-of-school learning have profoundly important repercussions that echo throughout the years,” he said.
Click here to go to the Johns Hopkins Center for Summer Learning.
This is an excerpt from the podcast available on the home page:
Research from Karl Alexander and others in the department of Sociology looked at the achievement gap and looked at test scores of young people in the spring and in the fall, and what they found is a really staggering pattern — that typically young people learn at about the same rates during the regular school year, only to see a significant drop off in academic performance in the area of reading particularly for low income kids over the summer months. And it’s not just an issue for low income kids. If you look at middle and upper income kids, regardless of income, kids experience a setback of over two months in math performance as well during the summer.
The conclusion is:
If you keep the kids away from the TV, the computer, the game console or whatever electronic babysitter they have at home and get them involved in something that stimulates their minds they’ll do much better in school.
For a copy of the original paper click this link Lasting Consequences of the Summer Learning Gap by: Karl L. Alexander, Linda Steffel Olson, and Doris R. Entwisle.
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