Gongol.com Archives: June 2025
June 25, 2025
Who's to stop summer learning loss?
Around this stage of summer each year, parents, teachers, and school administrators tend to engage in a complex dance wherein each group frets about summer "learning loss". None among them really has a meaningful plan to prevent it, nor even a clear understanding of which losses really matter. We seem to know little, other than that standardized test scores slide backwards during summer break. ■ Teachers can point at parents and say they should impose discipline around learning habits and practices at home during vacation. Parents can question whether school-year learning was as effective as it should have been if just a couple of months off can do so much damage. Administration, meanwhile, may well worry that every day off equals lower standardized test scores. ■ We're very poor at framing what aspects of learning really matter. Do the facts matter more, or do the habits? Does ability to follow instruction matter more, or does intrinsic motivation to learn? ■ Virtually all learning is about scaffolding, of course: Connecting old learning to new concepts is what most progress is all about. So to some extent, retaining old facts matters. But perhaps even more, it matters whether the child develops some state of curiosity that allows them to build their own scaffolding. ■ For one kid, the subject may be dinosaurs; for others, it could be horses or graphic design or space exploration. Enough "Why?" and "How?" questions related to a topic of interest, and invariably a broadening of applicable academic tools become useful in order to learn more. ■ There's a lot of research yet to be done, but it seems likely that parents can worry less about the exact details and facts that their children learn and pay more attention to encouraging kids to find something they can sustain a high degree of interest in learning. Real intrinsic enthusiasm for a subject (even when it's not part of a bigger curriculum) is a great source of motivation to learn academic topics.
