Summer Reading ~ What the Research Says


Happy summer, everyone!  It's Andrea from Reading Toward the Stars!  Even though my summer is coming to a close, I am still enjoying every moment I can of it.

Yesterday, Carla shared reasons that children in poverty suffer more from reading loss over the summer from the book Summer Reading by Richard Allington.  You can read that post by clicking {here}.

Today I will focus on chapter 2, which shares research findings for interventions that brought some help with summer slide to students in poverty.

After using rigorous methods to find research that had already been conducted, they came up with these 8 categories for the outcomes.

1.  attitudes toward reading
2.  motivation to read
3.  reading behavior
4.  basic language skills
5.  emergent literacy skills
6.  reading performance
7.  writing performance
8.  general academic performance


The bottom line

So...


From all of the many research the authors dug through, they used the most rigorous ones to show their data.  They found what we all probably already know:

"Providing books and magazines to children - either by lending the materials to them or by giving them the materials to keep - improves their attitudes toward reading, the amount of reading that they do, their acquisition of basic literacy skills, and their reading performance."  (Allington, 2013)  

In the next few posts, find out how different studies in different schools worked for their communities and how the children fared with their summer reading.  I love some of the ideas and how the interventions worked for these communities, so you won't want to miss them!

How has your school handled summer reading?  

What are some things you can do to help prevent summer slide?

And don't forget to come back tomorrow and the rest of the week to read more!





OTHER SUMMER READING BOOK STUDY POSTS:


4 comments

  1. In K, we send home paper books from Reading A to Z and encourage the library, but it's so hard to get our population reading!! Our school is going to tackle the "getting students interested and excited" piece of the puzzle next year.

    Heather
    The Land of I Can

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    1. We have the same problem at our school. This book has some amazing ideas for summer reading with data to back it.

      Andrea

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  2. Our school handles summer reading in different ways each year. For example, one year we did the One book, One School concept, another year we sent a bingo board home to students to mark off their reading and earn a prize, and this year we have a summer reading blog that students are using. Each year is different and some of the programs are more successful than others. I think an important piece of the puzzle is maintaining the excitement for reading during the summer, which Heather mentioned above. We are sending out instant messages this summer to remind students to blog, but I would love to hear other ideas. :)

    Wendy
    Read With Me ABC

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    1. So true about maintaining the excitement about reading. I love the idea of a blog for summer school, but some of our students don't have internet access because they can't even get it. I love some of the ideas in the book and have plans to try some out over the next few years.

      Andrea

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