Dive Brief:
- Participation in summer school helped modestly increase students’ math achievement in 2022 and 2023 but had no impact on reading, according to an analysis by NWEA, an assessment and research company.
- The gains seen in math are equal to about 2–3 weeks of learning during the school year. The findings also suggest summer school combined with school-year academic supports as effective approaches for learning interventions.
- NWEA recommends summer learning programs increase their duration and intensity to at least four — but ideally five to six — weeks of programming, with 90 minutes of math and 120 minutes of reading instruction at minimum each day. Additionally, programs should strive for a 75% or higher daily attendance rate to boost summer school’s impact.
Dive Insight:
Many districts across the country expanded summer learning and tutoring opportunities to offset drops in achievement after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted in-person instruction.
NWEA's recent analysis includes student assessment data from 10 large school districts that participated in the Road to Recovery research practice partnership with researchers from NWEA, the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, and the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.
The 10 unnamed districts serve nearly 450,000 students. Six of the districts participated in both years of the study, and four participated only in one year.
The analysis said there was not a clear explanation for why math achievement rose but reading did not. While this finding contradicts other research, it aligns with pre-pandemic data that show summer school and other school-based instruction can have stronger effects on math than on reading, NWEA said.
Another possible explanation is that students who don't attend summer school could still be engaging in reading on their own over the summer. That could weaken or erase any comparison between math and reading summer program impacts, especially if summer school offers limited reading instruction, according to NWEA.
"The null findings in reading do not imply that summer school literacy instruction should be abandoned," the report said. Instead, NWEA said, “more work is needed” to identify effective program approaches and to understand how summer school participants’ reading development compares to those who don't participate.
Additionally, NWEA calls for districts to explore more intensive literacy instructional strategies, targeted interventions for struggling readers, and partnerships with community organizations to provide assistance with reading supports.
Repeating participation in summer school benefited students over cumulative years, according to the NWEA data from 2023. Across four districts in the study, returning students in both 2022 and 2023 summer programs improved their math scores as much or more in the second summer as students attending for the first time in 2023.
