The topic of the “summer slide” seems to come up every year. Research, conducted in the 1970s and ’80s, shows students lose on average about a month’s worth of reading skills and two months’ worth of math over the summer. The decline is more significant for low-income students.
But new research questions whether the summer slide is as serious as experts once thought. Recently, Paul von Hippel tried to replicate that research and couldn’t.
“I didn’t believe it at first,” he said. “The new data do not look anything like the data from the 1980s.”
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