How to Beat Summer Brain Drain With Technology

Remember that old standard essay, “What I did over summer vacation”? You probably wrote some variation of it just about every year until high school. Despite the open-ended question, and the fact that you were simply asked to summarize what had just happened in the prior weeks, you may remember it as somewhat difficult to do. Why? The answer is the Summer Slide.

The Summer Slide is what we call the learning loss that occurs in students when they’re not engaged in educational activities over the summer months. After a single school break, it’s not insurmountable – you may recall that your essay writing improved once you were fully re-entrenched in schoolwork. But if left unchecked over time, it can have devastating effects.

More than a century of academic studies – the oldest was published in American Education in 1906 – all tell us the same thing: students lose learning over summer months and score more poorly on standardized tests at the end of a summer than they did before vacation began. Moreover, the problem disproportionately affects students from lower income backgrounds. In 2011, the RAND Corporation conducted a study of learning loss. They determined that elementary students' performance falls by about a month over the summer and that the achievement gap between higher- and lower-income students widens year after year.

According to a 2007 study from Johns Hopkins University, two-thirds of the 9th grade reading achievement gap results from cumulative, unequal access to summer learning opportunities. The researchers came to this conclusion after tracking the academic progress of Baltimore students from their entry into first grade until age 22. The effects of this cumulative gap reach later into life: low-income students are statistically less likely to graduate from high school or to enter college.

This is not to say that children should have no fun over the summer. Rather that children of all ages and backgrounds also need some sustained stimuli to keep their minds active over the summer. Camps help, but many lack an academic focus, and older kids often don’t want to go at all. With the exception of government-funded programs, camps also require additional costs from parents; effectively shutting out lower-income kids.

Until now, universal, accessible, low-cost solutions for summer learning have been difficult to implement on a large scale. However, thanks to the development of robust online learning platforms and increased access to the internet, we can finally tackle these age-old problems with new technology.

First of all, there are hundreds of online courses available now across a wide variety of topics. Many of these are geared toward high school-aged kids, or even younger. Some platforms even roll out special offerings to meet summer learning needs. For example, at edX we’ve just launched our Summer Learning initiative, for which we’re re-running many courses or offering them at-your-own-pace over the summer.

A good number of online courses are useful for high school students looking for help in their studies, in preparation for AP exams, or guidance for the college admissions process. Others are great for high school students ramping up to AP classes in the fall or for college students brushing up over the summer. Still more are perfect for professional development; enabling working adults to get ahead and take advantage of summer slowdowns.

Online learning in general lends itself particularly well to combatting Summer Slide. MOOC courses are flexible. They can be taken at any time, from anywhere with an Internet connection. This means that there’s no need to miss out on a beach day. Learning can occur in air conditioned cafes or libraries with Wi-Fi, or in sunny parks on LTE-tethered laptops, or on buses or trains on mobile devices. Moreover, as a good many MOOCs have been developed and taught by the best educational institutions in the world, the quality and depth of available courses is simply incredible.

Summer Slide has been a pervasive problem affecting millions of students over many decades. Starting with young students, unchecked summer learning losses can grow into nearly insurmountable skills gaps by the time a child reaches full adulthood. The tremendous need for summer learning has been apparent for some time, but actionable, scalable solutions have remained elusive. Now however, thanks to online learning, the power to stop Summer Slide in its tracks is literally at our fingertips.