Is the "learning loss" over breaks an illusion?

I wrote an article about this recently, the gist of which is that if knowledge retention from school is about 50% after three years, the relatively small effect sizes of the "summer slide" and pandemic-related school closures should be interpreted as students forgetting what they would've forgotten anyway, after graduation. Since post-graduation retention is mostly what we care about as an educational goal, it's not so much that test scores are worse after summer break, but that they're more accurate after summer break.

In theory, by making courses shorter breaks are also hurting students' ability to learn in depth, and depth also improves long-term retention. But in practice, I think depth is difficult-to-impossible with subjects the student doesn't have an affinity for, and the best way for someone to study something they have an affinity for is, often, the kind of unstructured learning that happens more in summer enrichment activities than school proper.

So, if anything, summer breaks should be longer, with the money saved going into subsidizing optional educational activities and day care over break. Am I missing something?

Submitted August 31, 2024 at 07:03AM by honoredb https://ift.tt/6M9Xvik