Education policy, say the authors of Summer Learning Inequality in Ontario, “should be informed by research that distinguishes school-based learning from learning that occurs during non-school time.” With American studies finding socio-economic disparities in learning tend to increase over the summer months, Scott Davies and Janice Aurini set out to collect data on literacy growth for a non-random sample of Ontario school children in Grades 1–3 during the first two years (2010 and 2011) of the Summer Learning Program. Among their findings: There were strong disparities by family socio-economic status (SES), with affluent children gaining literacy while those from poorer families lost literacy. In this 2013 paper, the first large-scale Canadian study of summer learning, Davies and Aurini discuss the implications of these and other findings for Canadian education policy and future research.
(Report provided courtesy of University of Toronto Press)
