They provide different activities and enrichment for students focusing on decreasing the achievement gap by developing their reading and math skills through the summer.
[5] There are programs that focus on what type of help students need most, developing a customized learning plan.
[8] While there is a large number of summer programs that are held in-person there are also many where students can participate while staying home.
[11] This loss was most acute in factual and procedural learning such as mathematical computation, where an average setback of more than two months of grade-level equivalency was observed among both middle- and lower-class students.
These results are consistent with other researchers' findings that a family's socioeconomic status affects children's achievement scores almost exclusively when school is closed.
Barbara Heyns’ 1978 landmark study of 2,978 6th and 7th graders in the Atlanta city public schools was the first thorough investigation of summer learning.
As this data shows, virtually the entire achievement gap reflects differences between low-SES and high-SES students’ home environments, with cognitive gains during the school year being relatively equal between both groups.
[14] The authors also confirmed that the SES achievement gap continues to grow after schooling starts, with summer learning accounting for the vast majority of the difference.
For those low-SES students who do not have access to high quality summer learning opportunities, the personal impact is significant.
[16] In an economy that is increasingly unaccommodating of low-skill workers, joblessness and declining wages are related to growth in ghetto poverty.
The correlation between SES and educational attainment thus has significant implications for the likelihood of low-SES children escaping poverty.
Cooper's (1996) study (as cited in Graham, McNamara and VanLankveld, 2011, pg.575) indicates that the gap in the learning cycle which occurs during summer vacation is more prominent for children that are less advantaged.
In a study conducted by Kim (2006) an intervention was designed to provide children with effective summer learning experiences and to improve the reading abilities of minority student's and struggling readers.
However, such findings are not consistent with a recent review by Guryan and Kim (2010) whereby a summer reading intervention was implemented for low-income Latino children.
Low-income parents often lack the resources to provide children with sufficient reading materials needed to reinforce important literacy skills.
Based on the analysis of pre-test and post-test data collected during the study, children demonstrated significant improvements in developing their literacy skills (Graham, 2011).
Timmons (2008) also identifies the importance of providing literacy education to parents and children, while also bringing them together to work collaboratively in group situations.