Math summer slide is ‘significant,’ but reading loss much smaller, data shows

“Dive Brief: Assessment data from 2023 spring and fall testing cycles shows the average amount of learning loss for K-8 students between school years — also known as the summer slide — was "significant" in math but unchanged in reading, according to a recent analysis by NWEA, an assessment and research company. The math score drops are equivalent to about 10% to 30% of what students learn in a typical school year as measured by NWEA's Rasch Unit scale, or RIT scale. Meanwhile, average spring and fall 2023 reading scores stayed nearly the same. To help keep students' skills sharp over the summer months, NWEA recommends that schools offer high-quality summer learning programs, as well as provide families with resources to support age-appropriate reading and math skill development. Dive Insight: NWEA's analysis said many students' fall test scores can be lower, on average, compared to their spring scores due to forgetting academic skills from the previous school year over the summer. Certain knowledge and skills, such as procedural skills, vocabulary, isolated facts and multi-step tasks are particularly susceptible to gaps in practice. The organization conducted its analysis using a model-based estimate. Because students test at different times in the spring and fall, this approach can help researchers get a better estimate of the expected summer loss, according to Megan Kuhfeld, co-author of the research and director of growth modeling and data analytics at NWEA . One possible reason reading saw less summer learning loss compared to math, NWEA said, is that students may be more likely to read outside of school than to practice math. And because learning math involves procedural skills that may fade from memory more quickly, that learning may be more difficult to retain between school years. The data on summer learning loss, however, has a lot of variability, said Kuhfeld . For example, in the data analyzed, students had RIT scores spanning the 10th through 90th percentiles. "We can't explain exactly why some students are doing so much better in the summer" and why others have substantial learning loss, Kuhfeld said. That's because there's not a good way to know what non-school-based activities students are engaged in over the summer months and the impact of those activities on learning, she said. "What causes this huge variation is the million dollar question," Kuhfeld said. The analysis used NWEA's 2025 MAP Growth norms to estimate the expected RIT score change for students near the end of the school year in the spring and the beginning of the next school year in the fall. The 2025 norms were developed from a dataset that includes about 30% of all U.S. public schools and 13.8 million students, according to Kuhfeld. In separate research published in April by NWEA, the authors, including Kuhfeld, looked at summer slide data from four different assessment tools that measure summer learning progress in math and reading across grades pre-K-8, including the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - K direct cognitive tests, MAP Growth, i-Ready and Star. The latter three diagnostic assessments showed test scores dropped or flattened during the summer with the largest average drops being in math. The ECLS-K:2011 test scores, however, show that learning slows down but does not drop over the summers after kindergarten and 1st grade.

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