Some studies suggest that children who get a three-month summer vacation, as is traditional in the United States, lose as much as a month of progress in math skills over their summer vacation. This loss of learning is particularly noticeable among lower-income students, even though they perform equally to their peers during the school year.
More facts about summer vacation:
- Studies show that low-income students lose more of their reading comprehension skills during summer vacation than middle-income students do. A study at Johns Hopkins University suggested that by ninth grade, about 75 percent of the achievement gap between students from different economic levels could be accounted for by the loss of learning during summer vacation.
- The New York Board of Regents found that, on average, one month of review is needed at the beginning of every school year to compensate for summer learning loss.
- A study by the University of Delaware estimated that if U.S. schools added three weeks onto the school year and required 10 minutes of math homework every day during the summer, students' lost progress in math would drop by one-third.
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