Solving summer slide: Strategies and suggestions

Summer learning loss suggests that that students’ learning achievement drops over the summer holidays when they are not at school, especially those from low socioeconomic backgrounds. The purpose of the studies reported was to investigate the effect summer learning loss has on student achievement in the New Zealand context and to determine whether encouraging Year 3 students from both low- and high-decile schools to read self-selected books over the summer helped stem the summer slide. Results indicated a positive effect of the summer books programme on STAR Reading, and the “poor” reading group made the most gains in sentence and paragraph comprehension. Strategies and suggestions to counter summer slide are outlined.