My Summer Learning Loss x 4

An article I read today has got me thinking. According to an article in LD online, research by the foundation Reading is Fundamental (RIF) suggests that children who do not read over the summer experience a loss of reading fluency and comprehension skills, while students who do read actually gain skills. In addition, the author throws in, students lose more than two years of grade level equivalency in math if they are not stimulated.

Shocking, right?

The RIF research seems to match squarely with research publicized last year by John Hopkins University's National Institute for Summer Learning that mykidsupport referenced last summer. According to that research, lower-income children reportedly lost two to three months of reading skills over the summer while middle- to upper-income children tended to make gains in comprehension, attributable in part to an increased proclivity to read. The underlying message for both pieces of research: Make sure your children read this summer. No surprises there.

For me, the last line on math stimulation was the more surprising, in part because it did not seem to square with the Institute’s research. In that research, children were shown to lose between two and two and one-half months of math computations skills over the summer without practice. Even for someone as unpracticed in math as I am, two months seems dramatically less than two years.

Admittedly, I may be splitting hairs; the important fact is that summer brain inactivity in math or reading can lead to big losses. The size of the loss is, to some extent, irrelevant.

But the fuzziness of the math is telling. The reality is that the focus of summer learning loss is reading, not math. Teachers require summer reading but rarely require summer math. Parents model and encourage reading over the summer but rarely model or encourage math.

And it’s not just a summer problem. Take me. I’m 42 years old. I do plenty of reading; my fluency and comprehension are probably – more or less - in tact. But since my freshman year in college, I have rarely practiced math, with the exception of the odd excel spread sheet, credit card payment or check balance. So, let’s see if I can do the math, that’s 26 years of summer learning loss times four. How many of us are the same? Is it any wonder that math gets short shrift in statistics like these? Is it any surprise that our children perform significantly worse in math and science tests worldwide than children from other developed countries.

The fact is that we are dismissive of math and that dismissiveness is endemic to our culture. Schools, parents, teachers, journalists – we’re all to blame.

So what can we do to address this issue? We can start by stopping summer math learning loss. We can buy summer math books such as this math sharpener series And we, as adults, can start practicing math in our leisure, not just in the summer but throughout the year. Sudoku anyone?

July 12,2010

Author Elizabeth Wilcox is founder of mykidsupport.com, author of The Mom Economy (Berkley, 2003) and a longtime journalist focused on parenting, children and women's issues.