Summer reads
A little reading, writing and ‘spiral review’ can help students bridge the summer slide
By:
Pamela Martineau
Published: June 14, 2011
How many kids would trade the lazy days of summer for multiplication worksheets, hours reading Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” or textbook exercises that chronicle the intricacies of recombinant DNA?
It’s difficult to quantitatively answer that question, but anecdotally, it appears more parents, teachers and school districts aren’t asking kids to make that choice. They’re requiring—or at least strongly recommending—that kids trade some of their down time for homework. The move is an effort to address the widely chronicled summer slide, in which kids lose skills learned during the school year as they kick back at the pool or play Wii during the long months of summer slacking. And with funding for summer school evaporating with the state’s continuing budget crisis, some parents and educators view homework over the extended break as a way to at least partially fill that gap.
But what about kids whose parents aren’t in a position to enforce summer homework? Will those kids fall further behind students with more structured home lives? Does the disparity risk further exacerbating the achievement gap, in which kids from lower socioeconomic strata fall further behind their more economically advantaged peers? Education experts fear the answer to both questions is yes but say there may be ways to mitigate the potential widening of the achievement gap that could be caused by mandatory summer homework. Of course, there are education experts who question the validity of homework at all, but even homework skeptics report that summer reading and certain kinds of review work—as opposed to the study of new material—can benefit kids on many levels.
“It’s quite a quandary,” says Douglas Fisher, a professor of education at San Diego State University who has written extensively about making homework assignments more meaningful to students. Fisher says required summer homework has the potential to widen what he calls the academic “Matthew Effect”—a reference to biblical verse in the Book of Matthew that’s entered the larger culture in the observation that “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”
“We end up with kids who have sophisticated support systems at home and kids who don’t,” Fisher says. Kids with the sophisticated parental support systems are far more likely to complete any homework packets or reading lists sent home by a school district or teacher. These kids, in turn, are more likely to lessen their summer learning loss and move ahead of their peers academically once the school year starts.
“You end up with structured inequities between the haves and have-nots,” says Fisher. “It’s something, that as a profession, we have to think through.”
Fisher says it is not just summer homework that carries the potential to exacerbate the achievement gap. Wealthier kids’ parents tend to sign them up for enrichment activities such as writing, math or science camps, tutors and other learning activities. These programs also widen the so-called Matthew Effect, pushing the socioeconomically advantaged forward, leaving the less economically advantaged behind.
But there seems to be little debate that some kind of summer homework—especially reading—can help to mitigate summer learning loss, which has been definitively established in the research. The most frequently cited study is by Harris Cooper, chairman of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. “On average, children’s tests scores were at least one month lower when they returned to school in fall than scores were when students left in spring,” Harris wrote in “Summer Learning Loss: The Problem and Some Solutions.”
The work of Harvard University education professor Jimmy Kim indicates that summer learning loss is higher for low-income kids. Maintaining the literacy levels of the lower income kids is therefore especially important, Kim stresses. Kim’s research indicates that kids who read four or five books during the summer don’t experience the same levels of learning loss as their non-reading counterparts. Perhaps not coincidentally, the U. S. Department of Education recommends that kids read a minimum of five books in the summer.
So what can educators, parents and school districts do in terms of making homework and reading over the break meaningful and accessible to all kids?
First off, advocates SDSU’s Fisher, if teachers do assign summer work it should be what he describes as “spiral review.” That is, the work reviews previously learned material, sometimes material that has been learned months before. Spiral review allows students to confirm their understanding of previously learned concepts and assess their learning themselves. It also helps to keep concepts fresh.
“You don’t want to introduce kids to new concepts when there is no scaffolding” to support the new concepts, Fisher says. This model of homework supports Fisher’s ideal of the “gradual release of responsibility” for homework. In this model, students are able to assume responsibility for the homework because the specific task asked of them has been adequately modeled for the students.
Therefore, in the summer months, students should do some kind of review work, Fisher recommends. He adds that online peer-to-peer homework sites such as www.dweeber.com allow kids to share learning and concepts with others through online discussion boards and chats. Cathy Vatterott, an associate professor of education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis—and a former middle school teacher and principal—has a website, www.homeworklady.com, with other advice, insights and resources. One strategy she encourages is creating an online homework club where kids can connect with educators and others in a virtual learning environment that can temporarily supplant school.
In an ideal world, Fisher sees school districts establishing online monitoring systems where kids would log in over the summer and complete assignments that would be reviewed and commented on by educators who staff the site. Kids also could use the site to communicate with each other about work. He is not aware of any such online programs now.
In the meantime, in the real world, parents, students and educators do what they can to combat the summer slide. Despite ongoing disputes over the value of homework, most educators report that parents—and even some students—want and ask for more homework. According to a 2008 survey by MetLife Inc., homework is considered “important” or “very important” by 83 percent of teachers, 81 percent of parents and 77 percent of students.
Alison Wiscombe, president of the Peralta District PTA in Alameda County, says she wholeheartedly supports summer homework. The mother of a high school freshman and two students who have graduated high school, Wiscombe says her school district sends out recommended summer reading lists, but the reading is not mandated by the teachers. She wishes it were.
“I encourage my kids to get something to do over the summer which bridges them over the summer slide,” says Wiscombe. “The slide can be pretty severe. And as long as [the work] isn’t too much—such as reading or note taking—I think it’s a good thing.”
“Besides,” she adds, “you can read from the beach.”
The Los Angeles Unified School District—California’s largest—is among those that post recommended reading lists for students online and at public libraries. The reading isn’t required at LAUSD, and there is no hammer to hold over kids’ heads to ensure they do it. Many individual teachers, however, especially those who teach honors or advanced placement courses, do require summer work; some give students tests or other assessments at the beginning of the school year to gauge whether they have done the assignments.
Bonnie Rejaei, a parent with children in LAUSD’s Palisades Charter High School, says most English teachers at the school request that kids read at least one book over the summer from an approved list. Some teachers do some sort of assessment of the reading once school starts, others don’t. Still other educators offer extra credit for the work once school starts in the fall. Summer reading lists are emailed to all families. Pali’s Parent-Teacher-Student Association tries to support the summer reading program by offering a free Robeks nutritional drink card to students who read a certain number of books; last year, 150 cards were given out.
As a parent, Rejaei says she tries to provide some sort of education or studies over the summer, or a two- to three-week “learning camp.”
“They seem to enjoy the challenge without the pressure of grading in the equation,” Rejaei says of her kids.
So what do students think of summer homework? Is it meaningful to them or a seemingly useless drag?
Hagr Balla, a rising senior at Davis Senior High School in the Davis Joint Unified School District near Sacramento, recalls that at the end of her eighth-grade year students who would be taking freshman biology were asked to learn over 100 biology root words over the summer. They were tested on the material on the second day of school.
“I think it was beneficial for everyone to be more familiar with the roots, but most people crammed and forgot most of them after the test,” says Balla.
But Kayla McCarty, a 2011 graduate of Davis Senior High, hasn’t found the required summer homework she’s been given to be very helpful. She says she was assigned summer homework for her Advanced Placement U.S. history course between her sophomore and junior years. She was asked to read three chapters of a textbook and write brief responses to questions.
“I honestly didn’t find it that beneficial because I ended up doing the work at an airport the week before summer ended, which resulted in my not paying attention to the work, not really caring about the work and having pretty sloppy work,” says McCarty. “I think students push the summer work until the end of vacation because they keep telling themselves that they’ll do it ‘tomorrow.’
“In the end, it’s like giving weekend homework,” McCarty adds. “Instead of doing it Sunday night at 1 a.m., we do the work the few days before school and rush through it because we’re irritated that we can’t be having fun.”
Both Balla and McCarty, however, describe doing a fair bit of self-motivated summer work—generally reading. McCarty describes reading for pleasure regularly throughout the summer. She says she keeps a journal with her “at all times, summer or not.”
“The constant writing keeps my brain stimulated, but I definitely pretend that math and science has ceased to exist during the summer,” says McCarty.
Balla says she reads many novels over the summer “from all sorts of genres.” She also reads advance copies of books being considered for the public library’s young adult section, which helps library officials determine which books to order.
“Other types of reading I do regularly and over the summer are Web and magazine articles,” says Balla. “I spend hours reading articles about sports, politics, current events, health, et cetera.”
The pleasure reading is a good thing, suggests Davis Senior High English teacher Sarah O’Keefe. O’Keefe, who teaches honors and AP classes, says she posts a reading list on her classroom door at the end of the school year that contains the entire school board-approved reading list for the English Department for every grade at the high school. The expectation is that the kids look at the list to see if there are books on it that they haven’t read in other courses. She wants the students to begin the year—especially in the AP courses—with a familiarity with the body of work that has been approved for reading at the high school. She does not assess students at the beginning of the year on the reading. She says she just doesn’t have time within the rigorous curriculum she must get through, especially since the academic year has been shortened due to the budget crisis. On the second day of classes, her students are already writing an in-class essay.
“I am never without a set of essays from the second day of school until school ends in June,” reports O’Keefe.
And even after that, it’s a safe bet that O’Keefe bundles some work-related material into her summer reading. After all, the rich may get richer and the poor poorer, but the wealthiest among us are those who never stop investing in our own minds.
Pamela Martineau is a freelance writer and educator.
Summer reads: Surfing the Web
Here are some helpful websites to maneuver through the world of homework and summer learning loss.
National Summer Learning Association
www.summerlearning.org
“The National Summer Learning Association provides services to communities, school districts, and programs to support your efforts to make quality summer learning programs accessible to youth,” according to the voluntary association’s website.
‘Summer Learning Loss: The Problem and Some Solutions’
http://bit.ly/lcTor7
Harris Cooper’s article, quoted in this article, was published by the Clearinghouse on Early Education and Parenting.
International Reading Association
www.reading.org
This membership organization posts recommended reading lists, research information and other useful tools.
Dweeber.com
www.dweeber.com
This online learning community for kids offers study session chat rooms and an interactive test that helps kids ascertain their learning styles. It was launched by Smartwired, a group working with the U.S. Defense Department, among other parties, to help children and young adults develop their intellectual resources.
Homeworklady.com
www.homeworklady.com
Education professor Cathy Vatterott explores research on homework and gives educators, parents and school administrators tips on how to make homework more effective.