Research shows that when students are provided with the opportunity to engage with just-right, high-interest books and relevant learning activities, they can avoid the “summer slide” that robs them of literacy gains they have made during the school year. But, finding ways to encourage and foster summer reading can be a challenge for many districts. In this web seminar, a panel of experts including the executive director of the National Summer Learning Association, the president and co-founder of MetaMetrics, and the president of myON discussed the importance of summer reading, the results of their discussions with the U.S. Department of Education about the topic, and how creative partnerships and collaboration among districts, nonprofits, communities and solutions providers can prevent students from losing ground in their reading progress during the summer months.
SARAH PITCOCK
Executive Director
National Summer Learning Association
www.summerlearning.com
There’s a “faucet” of learning resources flowing to all young people during the school year. All young people have access to books at school, so school is a great equalizer in terms of access. The real issue is when school is out. That’s where real inequity and real gaps come into play. When that “faucet” of resources is turned off during the summer, low-income youth in particular might not have access to books at home, so that is when we see the achievement gap widen.
The good news is that there’s a lot of research that shows that high-quality programs can reduce, prevent, and even reverse summer learning loss. We have seen achievement gains over the summer through research-based, high-quality interventions. There has been a lot of national attention around this issue because the data is so compelling, both on the need and the benefits. We have been partnering with the White House and about ten different federal agencies on a national initiative called the Summer Opportunity Project. If you go to summerlearning.org/Whitehouse, you’ll find a funding resource guide. It’s extremely comprehensive and it looks at every federal program that can be used to fund summer programs. It also includes key studies on a number of state and local programs that are effectively blending those funding streams.
Another resource that we have on our website is an action tool that’s designed to help you take the first steps to expand and strengthen your summer offerings. myON happens to be one of the resources and interventions that we include in this compendium as a way of providing access to summer literacy supports for children. You can also join our New Vision for Summer School network, which is free for districts. We have almost 40 districts nationally that convene twice per year, and we provide web seminars and a lot of resources in between. You can also join us for our national conference on after-school and summer learning that will be in Seattle in October 2016.
MALBERT SMITH
President and Co-founder
MetaMetrics
www.Lexile.com
If you look at the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, when we compare ourselves on international assessments like PISA, and PIRLS, and TIMSS, we typically are not at the top. What is never acknowledged is that for the OECD countries, their average number of days in a school per year are 195, and our school year is 180. If you take that 15-day difference and multiply that by 12 years of schooling, it’s equivalent to another year of school.
If you take each one of those continuous summers and you look at the cumulative deficit, you see what started in kindergarten as a small gap has been exacerbated by 12 contiguous summers of turning off the flow of educational resources. So in spite of all the extraordinary things that are happening during the school year, those gaps get wider and wider. If we’re going to actually achieve the goal of college and career readiness, the low-hanging fruit isn’t to do more things within the 180 school days. We have to address the summer deficit.
If we’re going to have students reading over the summer, you have to pay attention to interest levels. And you have to pay attention to the match between the ability of the student and the difficulty of the book, so they will be exposed to new vocabulary and new syntactic structures. If we give them books they are interested in but are too hard, they will get frustrated and stop reading. If we pay attention only to the difficulty and the ability of the student but don’t pay attention to their interests, they are not going to read. So you have to account for all of those things. A web utility that we built searches through about 250,000 books and builds a personalized reading list for every student. So, for example, every fourth-grade student in Minnesota could have the same test score but have a very different interest profile, so it would build their own playlist. Then it will connect the student to the closest public library.
TODD BREKHUS
President
myON
www.myON.com
Our vision has been to use technology to help get kids reading. We established five key pillars for our platform: personalizing learning, unparalleled content, unlimited access, collaboration and success. With myON, students can enter which topic areas they are interested in, they can take an upfront Lexile(R) assessment, then we can fill their “digital backpacks” with thousands of digital books that are personalized to them, and they can access those books anytime, anywhere. In addition to that, we wanted the environment to be collaborative so that students could rate and review books, and start to write about books, and communicate and collaborate with their classmates while working on projects. And then, finally, to measure their success and see their results.
We actually benchmark their Lexile(R) —about every two weeks—so students can actually see their growth and how they are progressing. So we’ve been able to think about personalization and using this power for summer reading opportunities. We think it provides a few unique models. One is obviously providing the student and teacher with the choice of having the connection to the right content at the right time. When I was an English teacher, many times I wasn’t able to make my lessons dynamic because not everyone had access to all the texts. And summer projects become more interesting when teachers are able to set up projects where students have a choice of topics—say, something like mechanical engineering, or biomes, or the concept of “push and pull” if you are in a first-grade classroom.
We are launching our 2016 summer reading program. And we provide a summer reading toolkit of resources for districts, which is also part of the NSLA’s White House action toolkit. If you want to use myON to help you grow your summer activities and your summer reading plan, our toolkit provides a set of resources, such as reminders to send to homes, and scripts to read for robocalls to parents and your community to remind them to get reading.
To watch this web seminar in its entirety, please visit: www.districtadministration.com/ws032316