3 Ways Math Teachers Can Help Prevent the Summer Slide

As the school year wraps up, educators must prepare for a hinderance to their learning recovery efforts: summer learning loss. It’s a problem that has knocked students off track for decades and that has only been exacerbated by the pandemic.

When students experience the “summer slide,” they lose the learning gains they and their teachers worked so hard to make throughout the school year. This commonly happens if learning materials are inaccessible over the summer break. According to a study published in the American Education Research Journal, the average student loses between 17 and 34 percent of their learning gains during the summer.

Next Generation Learning Challenges published our thoughts on how math teachers can help prevent the summer slide and reduce the need to spend instructional time re-teaching material covered from the previous year during the first part of the school year.