Summer Learning Loss is Scary but Can Be Prevented

As students look forward to a long-awaited summer break, one issue becomes overlooked: summer learning loss.

Also known as the “summer slide,” summer learning loss is the decline in academic skills and knowledge that occurs over the summer. Summer learning loss affects students of all grade levels and can easily be prevented.

Research shows that summer learning loss has the extreme potential to simply kill off up to 40% of the knowledge students gained over the course of one school year.

One study from 2020 shows that more than half of students in the United States suffered from a learning loss over the course of five summers. In that group of more than half of American students, the average amount of knowledge lost over the summer was around 39%.

However, 39% is only the average. The percentage can vary greatly from student to student. While some children are able to gain 32% of information over the summer, other students were able to lose almost 90% of what they had learned over the course of the school year.

Learning loss can easily be prevented by the child though. There are a multitude of ways that students can prevent this.

One method to prevent learning loss is simply reading regularly throughout the summer. Reading throughout the summer stimulates the student’s brain and can help to prevent learning loss.

There are also various summer camps at various institutions that can help teach students new information in a fun and engaging way rather than allowing students to fall into the statistic of having lost information.

While summer learning loss can seem scary, there are simple ways to prevent it from occurring.