Connectedness as a Predictor of Academic and Youth Development Outcomes at a Summer Day Camp for Low-Income Youth

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Barcelona ◽  
Cindy Hartman
Keyword(s):  
Youth Development ◽  
Low Income ◽  
The United States ◽  
Learning Loss ◽  
Summer Learning ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
Recreational Activities ◽  
Academic Attitudes ◽  
Development Outcomes ◽  
Residential Camp

Organized camp programs impacted over 10 million youth in the United States in 2019 (American Camp Association, 2019). While residential camp programs have shown ample evidence of their potential to produce opportunities for growth and learning (Garst et al., 2011; Wilson et al., 2019), less is known about the benefits of summer day camp programs. Day camp programs have the potential to serve a more diverse group of campers than residential camps (Kimmelman, 2011), and have become popular formats for summer programs designed to enhance academic skills and prevent summer learning loss. This study sought to understand the factors that influenced self-perceptions of academic attitudes and positive youth development at a summer day camp program offering academic and recreational activities for economically vulnerable fourth to ninth graders (n=240). Specifically, the study was interested in the role that camp connectedness played in influencing perceptions of outcomes (Sibthorp et al., 2011). The study found that campers who participated in a summer day camp program reported that their interest in academic subjects increased over the course of the camp. Campers who had higher levels of connectedness to camp reported significantly stronger academic and youth development outcomes than those who had lower levels of connectedness. The study also found no significant differences in connectedness based on camper characteristics such as gender, age, race, ethnicity, school attended, or language spoken at home, suggesting that these variables were not salient in whether a camper felt connected to camp. These findings provide implications for the design and delivery of academically focused day camp programs to enhance feelings of connectedness, including the importance of using an intentional curriculum, offering a variety of academic and recreational activities, employing trained educators and youth development specialists, and being mindful of class and group sizes.

scholarly journals School's Out

Elements ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-52
Author(s):  
Charlie Power
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Education System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Current Evidence ◽  
Learning Loss ◽  
Summer Learning ◽  
Elementary And Secondary Education ◽  
Heated Debate ◽  
The Impact

The debate over the future direction of elementary and secondary education in the United States is fractious and contentious. Many of these are rooted in concerns over disparities in financial circumstances and race. While the full extent of the gaps, in addition to the United States' mediocre education system relative to other industrialized nations, has been a subject of frequent research and heated debate, one crucial component of this divide has yet to be analyzed: summer learning loss. This paper will closely analyze published literature in order to analyze the impact of summer education loss. Additionally, this paper will argue that summer learning varies by socioeconomic status (SES), with low-income populations gradually regressing over the years. This phenomenon has ramifications on students' achievement and explains the disparities that accumulate over a student's educational career. Finally, based on current evidence, this paper will make policy recommendations on how to change the current education system to better address summer's inherent inequities. 

scholarly journals More than Just Summer Reading: The Shift to "Summer Learning"

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Christine Caputo ◽  
Christy Estrovitz
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Summer Learning Loss ◽  
Learning Loss ◽  
Academic Achievement Gap ◽  
Summer Learning ◽  
Summer Vacation ◽  
Summer Reading ◽  
School Year ◽  
Summer Enrichment ◽  
Historical Sites

Yay summer! At the end of every school year, children are excited to begin their summer vacations. During this time off many students also look forward to a summer enrichment camp, traveling with their families, visiting local museums and historical sites, or many other experiences.For many others, especially children and teens from low-income communities, their summer vacation is not full of learning opportunities. Research over the last several years indicates that children who do not participate in learning experiences over the summer year after year have an academic achievement gap that grows throughout the elementary and middle school years. This summer learning loss can add up to about two-thirds of the gap in reading achievement by ninth grade.

scholarly journals Effects of a Summer Mathematics Intervention for Low-Income Children

2016 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Lynch ◽  
James S. Kim
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Group Treatment ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Laptop Computer ◽  
Learning Loss ◽  
Summer Learning ◽  
Mathematics Intervention ◽  
Low Income Children ◽  
Mathematics Program

Prior research suggests that summer learning loss among low-income children contributes to income-based gaps in achievement and educational attainment. We present results from a randomized experiment of a summer mathematics program conducted in a large, high-poverty urban public school district. Children in the third to ninth grade ( N = 263) were randomly assigned to an offer of an online summer mathematics program, the same program plus a free laptop computer, or the control group. Being randomly assigned to the program plus laptop condition caused children to experience significantly higher reported levels of summer home mathematics engagement relative to their peers in the control group. Treatment and control children performed similarly on distal measures of academic achievement. We discuss implications for future research.

How Positive Youth Development Can Support Low-Income Roma Youth Living in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 16-28
Author(s):  
Marija Bingulac
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Youth Development ◽  
Positive Youth Development ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Youth Of Color ◽  
Persistent Violence ◽  
Mainstream Society

Deprivation and discrimination, including the destruction of housing settlements, forced evictions, and persistent violence, led a portion of Europe’s 12 million Roma to seek refuge in the United States and Canada. Approximately 1 million Roma live in the United States, and 80,000 Roma currently live in Canada. Profound experiences of injustice in their home countries have led Roma in the United States to keep their lives hidden from mainstream society. The Roma as a race/ethnicity is not accounted for in any American surveys, and research on their well-being in the United States is scarce. This chapter fills knowledge gaps by presenting a one-of-a-kind comprehensive literature review synthesizing empirical evidence on the lives of Roma people and their youth in the United States by applying the positive youth development (PYD) framework that focuses on promoting positive asset-building for youth and seeing youth as vital resources in development strategies. In doing so, the chapter advances beyond the more usual narrative that has focused on the problems of Roma youth to examine the mechanisms that can enable them to flourish in the United States. Romani youth is a case study example of youth of color in general; this chapter adds to the body of knowledge that examines how PYD development matters for positive developmental outcomes of a minority group that has experienced socioeconomic disparities strictly because of the stigma of their identity.

The Implications of Summer Learning Loss for Value-Added Estimates of Teacher Effectiveness

2016 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Gershenson ◽  
Michael S. Hayes
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Effectiveness ◽  
Test Scores ◽  
Value Added ◽  
The United States ◽  
Summer Learning Loss ◽  
Learning Loss ◽  
Summer Learning ◽  
School Year ◽  
Value Added Models ◽  
Nationally Representative

School districts across the United States increasingly use value-added models (VAMs) to evaluate teachers. In practice, VAMs typically rely on lagged test scores from the previous academic year, which necessarily conflate summer with school-year learning and potentially bias estimates of teacher effectiveness. We investigate the practical implications of this problem by comparing estimates from “cross-year” VAMs with those from arguably more valid “within-year” VAMs using fall and spring test scores from the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K). “Cross-year” and “within-year” VAMs frequently yield significant differences that remain even after conditioning on participation in summer activities.

scholarly journals Lessons Learned from an After-School Program: Building Personal and Social Responsibility

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 162-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Nicole Ivy ◽  
K. Andrew R. Richards ◽  
Michael A. Lawson ◽  
Tania Alameda-Lawson
Keyword(s):  
Social Responsibility ◽  
Youth Development ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Skill Development ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
After School ◽  
Life Skill ◽  
Life Skill Development ◽  
Personal And Social Responsibility ◽  
Development Outcomes

Drawing from the physical activity and positive youth development literatures, this paper describes a novel after-school effort designed to enhance youths’ life skill development outcomes across school, family, and community settings. This program, which is derived from the Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility (TPSR) model, is a university-assisted effort serving 1st through 5th graders attending a low-income elementary school. As a part of this model’s approach, pre-service physical education teachers engage in a yearlong course sequence and practicum that enables them to deliver the program. University graduate students and faculty then provide ongoing support, facilitation, and training to the pre-service teachers at the same time they conduct field-based research on the effort. The preliminary data indicate that the program can successfully impact several teaching and life skill development outcomes. However, additional interventions appear to be needed to extend youths’ outcomes to settings outside of the program.

scholarly journals Proposal to the Spencer Foundation: Research Grants on Education: School’s Out For . . . Spring? Understanding the Response of School Districts in the United States to COVID-19-Related Disruptions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Rosenberg ◽  
Teomara Rutherford ◽  
Daniel Anderson ◽  
Rachel S. White ◽  
Ha Nguyen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
School District ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Educational Inequality ◽  
The United States ◽  
Summer Learning Loss ◽  
Learning Loss ◽  
Summer Learning ◽  
Related Information ◽  
To Come

There is no doubt that public education has suffered as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers are comparing the COVID slide to summer learning loss, noting this loss could be much worse for those already underserved by U.S. schools (Kuhfeld & Tarasawa, 2020). In order to understand who this loss impacts and how, we need data on school, district, and statewide responses to the pandemic as it unfolded. Luckily, these data are available, as school districts across the country updated their communities about plans for spring 2020. To capture these updates, our team uses multiple approaches for collecting COVID-19-related information via school district websites and social media to create a new, nationwide dataset of district responses.We also analyze how these responses relate to contextual characteristics of districts and their surrounding communities, which will provide a picture of how district characteristics may drive disparities in access to and quality of schooling during the pandemic. Identifying these associations are critical for understanding and disrupting the reproduction and deepening of educational inequality caused by the COVID-19 crisis. The resulting dataset will provide researchers with the information necessary to understand how education during the pandemic may impact students for years to come.

Can Schools Enable Parents to Prevent Summer Learning Loss? A Text-Messaging Field Experiment to Promote Literacy Skills

2017 ◽  
Vol 674 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew A. Kraft ◽  
Manuel Monti-Nussbaum
Keyword(s):  
Text Messaging ◽  
Educational Opportunity ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Fourth Graders ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
Summer Learning Loss ◽  
Learning Loss ◽  
Summer Learning ◽  
Positive Effects

The vast differences in summer learning activities among children present a substantial challenge to providing equal educational opportunity in the United States. Most initiatives aimed at reversing summer learning loss focus on school- or center-based programs. This study explores the potential of enabling parents to provide literacy development opportunities at home as a low-cost alternative. We conduct a randomized field trial of a summer text-messaging pilot program for parents focused on promoting literacy skills among first through fourth graders. We find positive effects on reading comprehension among third and fourth graders, with effect sizes of .21 to .29 standard deviations, but no effects for first and second graders. Texts also increased attendance at parent-teacher conferences but not at other school-related activities. Evidence to inform future efforts to reverse summer learning loss is provided by parents’ responses to a follow-up survey.

Demonstrating Nutrient Cost Gradients: A Brooklyn Case Study

2014 ◽  
Vol 84 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 244-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Karp ◽  
Gary Wong ◽  
Marguerite Orsi
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Energy Content ◽  
Food Selection ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Department ◽  
Micronutrient Deficiencies ◽  
Caloric Density ◽  
Low Income Families ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The Impact

Abstract. Introduction: Foods dense in micronutrients are generally more expensive than those with higher energy content. These cost-differentials may put low-income families at risk of diminished micronutrient intake. Objectives: We sought to determine differences in the cost for iron, folate, and choline in foods available for purchase in a low-income community when assessed for energy content and serving size. Methods: Sixty-nine foods listed in the menu plans provided by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for low-income families were considered, in 10 domains. The cost and micronutrient content for-energy and per-serving of these foods were determined for the three micronutrients. Exact Kruskal-Wallis tests were used for comparisons of energy costs; Spearman rho tests for comparisons of micronutrient content. Ninety families were interviewed in a pediatric clinic to assess the impact of food cost on food selection. Results: Significant differences between domains were shown for energy density with both cost-for-energy (p < 0.001) and cost-per-serving (p < 0.05) comparisons. All three micronutrient contents were significantly correlated with cost-for-energy (p < 0.01). Both iron and choline contents were significantly correlated with cost-per-serving (p < 0.05). Of the 90 families, 38 (42 %) worried about food costs; 40 (44 %) had chosen foods of high caloric density in response to that fear, and 29 of 40 families experiencing both worry and making such food selection. Conclusion: Adjustments to USDA meal plans using cost-for-energy analysis showed differentials for both energy and micronutrients. These differentials were reduced using cost-per-serving analysis, but were not eliminated. A substantial proportion of low-income families are vulnerable to micronutrient deficiencies.

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