What Will Summer Look Like? Summer Learning Loss and COVID-19 Learning Gaps

Summer 2021 will likely look much different than previous summers due to the impact of the now more than one-year-long pandemic.Here we share research about summer learning loss and overlap that with emerging studies illustrating how COVID-19 closures and remote learning have compounded learning loss, all of which disproportionately impacts Black children, indigenous children, children of color, and all children who live in poverty.

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

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.

School’s Out: The Role of Summers in Understanding Achievement Disparities

Summer learning loss (SLL) is a familiar and much-studied phenomenon, yet new concerns that measurement artifacts may have distorted canonical SLL findings create a need to revisit basic research on SLL. Though race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status only account for about 4% of the variance in SLL, nearly all prior work focuses on these factors. We zoom out to the full spread of differential SLL and its contribution to students’ positions in the eighth-grade achievement distribution. Using a large, longitudinal NWEA data set, we document dramatic variability in SLL. While some students actually maintain their school-year learning rate, others lose nearly all their school-year progress. Moreover, decrements are not randomly distributed—52% of students lose ground in all 5 consecutive years (English language arts).

The Sensitivity of Teacher Value-Added Scores to the Use of Fall or Spring Test Scores

Papay (2011) noticed that teacher value-added measures (VAMs) from a statistical model using the most common pre/post testing timeframe–current-year spring relative to previous spring (SS)–are essentially unrelated to those same teachers’ VAMs when instead using next-fall relative to current-fall (FF). This is concerning since this choice–made solely as an artifact of the timing of statewide testing–produces an entirely different ranking of teachers’ effectiveness. Since subsequent studies (grades K/1) have not replicated these findings, we revisit and extend Papay’s analyses in another Grade 3–8 setting. We find similarly low correlations (.13–.15) that persist across value-added specifications. We delineate and apply a literature-based framework for considering the role of summer learning loss in producing these low correlations.

Surprising new evidence on summer learning loss

It has been common knowledge for decades that poor and working-class students tend to experience “summer learning loss,” a drop in performance between spring and fall that serves to widen the gap between students. However, new research shows that the reality of summer learning loss is more complex. Megan Kuhfeld draws on data from the 3.4 million students who took the NWEA MAP Growth assessments to find that summer slide is common, but not inevitable. According to the data, the students who experienced the greatest loss were those who made the greatest gains during the previous school year. The research also calls into question about the usual explanations for learning loss, such as access to summer programs and length of the school year.