Published Online in:
American Educational Research Journal
July 9, 2020

Allison Atteberry, University of Colorado-Boulder
Andrew McEachain, RAND Corporation

Summer learning loss (SLL) is a familiar and much-studied phenomenon, yet new concerns that measurement artifacts distorted canonical SLL findings create a need to revisit basic research on SLL. Though race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status only account for about 4% of the variance in SLL, nearly all prior work focuses on these factors. We zoom out to the full spread of differential SLL and its contribution to students’ positions in the eighth-grade achievement distribution. Using a large, longitudinal Northwest Evaluation Association data set, we document dramatic variability in SLL. While some students actually maintain their school-year learning rate, others lose nearly all their school-year progress. Moreover, decrements are not randomly distributed— 52% of students lose ground in all 5 consecutive years (English language arts).

Read the full open-access article. 

Read the press release: "Study: More than Half of U.S. Students Experience Summer Learning Losses Five Years in a Row."