Summer Vacation: A Brain Drain on Children?

Research verifies that children’s summer vacation causes brain drain. They forget what they learned in school. There are ways to prevent brain drain.

According to an article by Valerie Strauss in the June15, 2009 edition of The Washington Post, brain drain is the term for the learning loss that many children experience over the summer vacation from school. Educators and parents are seeking strategies to prevent learning loss during the vacation time.

Research findings about Brain Drain

According to the Strauss article, researchers from John Hopkins University, the University of Virginia, the University of Tennessee, as well as others, most students lose two to two and a half months of math skills during the summer break. Students coming from low income homes, lose two to three months in reading skills. Middle class students, however, make slight gains in reading achievement as standardized test scores indicate.

The research findings suggest that children lose math computation skills when they don't use them and that middle-class students read more over the summer than those from poor families. This could possibly be because middle class students have access to more books in their homes than those from lower income homes.

According to the Strauss article, knowledge retention is related to the greater variety of summer experiences for children from middle-class and higher income homes. Their exposure to summer camps, vacations, and learning experiences in their own homes, facilitated by their parents, helps to reduce the effects of brain drain. The lack of resources for poorer children in the summer has vast, negative consequences.

Strategies to Prevent Brain Drain

According to the Strauss article, Richard Allington, an education professor from the University of Tennessee and a member of the International Reading Association, asserts, "If we can eliminate the summer gap, we can close the longstanding achievement gap between richer and poorer kids. Basically, even poor kids grow reading skills at about the same rate as middle-class kids, when they are in school. Two-thirds of the achievement gap occurs during the summers, not during the school year."

The Strauss article maintains that Richard Fairchild, executive director of the Center for Summer Learning at John Hopkins, sees value in summer learning programs for children to make up for the deficit. Fairchild’s center promotes quality summer learning programs, especially for children from less affluent families. His center has 5000 programs in 50 states that provide academic enrichment, physical exercise and healthy meals to children to better ensure academic success when they return to school.

Parents can help stave off their children’s brain drain by having them frequent the library in summer and encouraging reading. In addition, parents can have their children use safe, educational Internet sites.

Sylvan Learning Centers offer free grade-appropriate math workbooks for children to use in the summer months. Some of the Sylvan Centers offer a camp-like learning environment with craft activities, brain teasers and video streaming of important world events. Parents should check their local newspapers and bulletin boards for educational summer camp offerings, such as writing , computer, and theatre workshops.

Parents should also take advantage of opportunities to have their children use math computational skills. For example, if the children are swimming in the pool, parents can have them figure out the area, diameter, and volume of the pool. They can ask their children to compute how much the water in the pool would weigh at about 9 pounds per gallon. On road trips, parents can have their children compute the trip mileage by using a map and adding up the distance as indicated on the map.

Parents should have their children handle and count money. Parents can teach children how to use and balance a check book. Such activities will lessen the brain drain of math skills, the curricular area that is most dramatically affected by the summer lapse from school.