Summers: Some are reading, some are not! It matters

McGill-Franzen, A., Ward, N., & Cahill, M. (2016). Summers: Some are reading, some are not! It matters.
The Reading Teacher, 69 (6), 585-596.


How effective are summer programs that put books into the hands of low-income children? This accessible, thoughtful review looks at some of those programs and whether they help mitigate what has been called the “summer slide” (p. 586) in reading skills. Children living in poverty (that is now 51% of U.S. school children) seem to be more likely to experience this reduction, and that brings up concerns about a widening achievement differential between those children and more affluent children.

The programs reviewed here are built on the assumption that during the summer children living in poverty have less access to books than they do during the school year, and less access to books than children in affluent homes do, and that is a primary reason for the skill losses over the summer. The summer programs aim to get more books into the hands and homes of low-income children.

Several important threads popped up here. For me, the most important factor in the effectiveness of these summer programs was the element of student choice. Books in a home are not going to help if children do not read them. When children had choice, the programs seemed to make more of a difference. It seemed less important that there be a perfect match of “level” between the book and the child, though that was something included in some of the programs. While I don’t want to have a child feeling frustrated by difficult books, I am not one of those who thinks children should be limited to reading books that are only at a certain level (whether that is the Lexile level, the DRA level, or something else). Sometimes it’s good to sample a difficult book that is about something you love, so you can stretch and aspire, or maybe have a more advanced reader share the reading with you. It also can be good to read and reread an easy book that is well-loved and that you may have good experiences with (and doing that can build fluency!). Whether a book “fits” a reader or not can be strongly affected by interest and background knowledge. It is not surprising that being able to choose a book for oneself was a factor.

One fascinating thread related to the choice factor was that many children preferred to choose series books. There is some interesting discussion here about why series books may be good choices for young readers. They may not always represent what teachers and librarians think are the best books available, but their familiarity and predictability can really help readers learn about how books are structured. I thought about this, and realized that as a child, I also preferred series books. In my own case, that developed into a preference for the books of certain authors, which is very much like preferring a book series. Once you know an author’s kinds of characters and plots and language, it is easier to read more of those stories. For me, the progression was from Little Golden Books to Dr. Seuss to Beverly Cleary to Laura Ingalls Wilder to Pearl Buck to John Steinbeck to Jane Austen to Shakespeare and beyond! I also like some types of romance novels, and enjoy them as guilty pleasures. If you think about it, series books of some sort are part of most readers’ reading lives. To me, engaged reading is good reading, no matter what the book is. In school, I might want to nudge young readers toward some of the “better stuff”, but a summer read is a good thing and does not have to be anything other than engaging!

On that note, it interested me that some of the more structured programs, where adult relatives were given guidance on things centered on the books that they should do with the children, had less conclusive results than some of the programs that simply provided books to children. While it has been documented that with young readers it can be good to read interactively and use certain kinds of prompts, and there has been some success with showing parents and caregivers how to do that kind of reading, too much structure seems to be a bit too “school-like” and may not be all that effective when attempted at home in the summer. Reading needs to be a pleasurable, engaging thing to do in the summer. If it becomes something we have to do in the summer, and have to do a certain way, it may be less likely to happen.

Clearly, having books in their hands that they have chosen seems to be the main thing that makes a difference for children, and beyond that, ownership of the books was also important. If a book belongs to a child, it may make more of a difference than if the book is borrowed from a library or from the school.

One more fascinating thread here was a brief discussion of e-books and whether they might be a good way to get books into the hands of children in the summer. When you think about it, it could be a cost-effective approach. You could put many books onto devices and provide those at relatively low cost. There are corporations that could benefit from providing grants that would supply e-readers to kids. The authors here write about problems with access to such devices for low-income children, and furthermore, that when electronic devices were available, they often were not used for reading books. I can see how that could happen, and you might not want to supply the kinds of tablets that might just be used for games or videos. I don’t think e-books can ever really replace the experience of reading a paper book anyway, and probably we need both kinds of books. Each kind has its own pleasures and its own limitations. But e-books on e-readers could be at least one good tool for engaging children with summer reading.

The article gave me a lot to chew on, and I recommend it for that reason. It is not an exhaustive review of summer reading programs, but it is surprisingly wide-ranging for an article in a practitioner journal like this one.