What research says . . .

Academic Impact of Year Round Schooling
An Annotated Bibliography  

Compiled by
M. C. Newland, Ph.D.
Auburn University, Alabama
newlamc@auburn.edu

26 September, 1998

This is a review of some of the representative studies and reviews of year-round school calendars, preceded by some observations precipitated by having read through scores of studies.

Studies were selected for review because of their relevance, detailed analysis, or because they have figured in discussions of the year-round calendar in Auburn City Schools in Alabama.

The first set of notes describe studies for which I had access to the original paper. The second set are of summaries from the ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) database. Each set is listed in order of the year of publication. 

Calendar Change: An Inert Intervention

The only reasonable conclusion that can be reached from this body of literature is that changing the calendar, per se, is inert educationally.

            A reduction in class size might be beneficial. The addition of remedial or other programs might be beneficial. But none of these things is linked in any way to the calendar; they can be added without any modification of the traditional calendar. My review leads me to conclude that, academically, changing the calendar is about as useful as changing the color of the school buses. For many school systems (certainly for ours) it is very disruptive and a "reform" that has a high cost and little benefit.

Summer Learning Loss: False Assumptions

False Assumption No. 1
Relatively little forgetting occurs between September and June.

           One argument in this literature is that the "year-round" calendar reduces summer learning loss. Consider the assumptions behind the contention that reducing summer from 12 weeks to 6 weeks is going to have much of an impact. It assumes that relatively little forgetting occurs between September and June but a huge amount of forgetting takes place between July and September. This seems implausible on the face of it. Moreover, the  difficulties of measuring such loss are often dismissed but they are large.

           For example, in  order to document summer learning loss it is necessary to determine what is actually known in the spring and what is not known in the fall. This seemingly simple strategy is rarely followed. The one attempt to address this issue, which was accomplished in a literature review,  can not be used in support of the view that changing the calendar will have academic benefit  (see: Cooper et al., 1986, reviewed below). 

False Assumption No. 2
All learning and all forgetting is the same. It is not.

            Also lying behind this argument is, often, the assumption that all learning, and all forgetting is the same. It is not. Learning how to multiply is quite different from memorizing the twelve-times tables. Learning how to critique an argument, read a story, or think through a scientific argument is quite different from memorizing the name of an debate strategy, author of a story, or an obscure scientific fact.

Education is not the cumulative memorization of obscure, quickly-forgotten facts,  but the acquisition of fluency in selected content areas and the ability to speak, write, and analyze critically. Knowing how to do these things is not quickly forgotten. So what if some facts are forgotten in a few weeks? If they are needed for a later course then the student can be reminded of it at the appropriate time.

Intersessions Only Pretend to Fix Problem

Also inspect closely arguments that intersessions will allow struggling students to catch up with their peers. 

           These are students who are not doing well in school, may not have the resources as some of their peers, and may not even enjoy being in school. Then they are asked  to attend more school, which is often more of the same activity that they have already failed at, and to make up for nine weeks of failure in two weeks of intersession.  This makes no sense but, far worse, it pretends to solve a very serious problem while cheating the student out of an education and cheating society of an educated citizen. 

           The data do not provide any believable evidence that intersessions will help struggling or at-risk students. In many settings it has been reported that attendance at intersessions is poor, especially in the case of remedial sessions for at-risk students.

Education is too important to leave to changes that may sound good but that only pretend to fix a problem. Changing the calendar is cheap, to be sure, but you get what you pay for. Education is expensive, and educating the students with impoverished backgrounds or other barriers to academic achievement may be one of the most expensive, and useful, things that we can do. 

              The topsy-turvy world in which educators work in should be inspected, not the calendars. Who gets the least money and the teachers with the least experience? Those schools most desperate for seasoned professionals and a lot of resources.

Why isn't teaching like other professions? Why doesn't it reward the hard jobs and make filling them an honor reserved for the best and the brightest, and not a drudgery reserved for those who can't get the good jobs?

The editorial ends here. 

What follows is an annotated bibliography of studies that have figured into the debate over putative academic benefits said to result from a change in the calendar.

Merino, B.J. (1983) The impact of year-round schooling: A review.  Urban Education, 18, 298-316.

1.                  This is a review of the literature available at the time of writing. It concluded that while YRS may be useful for some things, it has no beneficial or detrimental impact on academics.

2.                   "Most studies found no significant differences between the two types of schedules with two actually showing negative effects for year-round schooling." Those two were elementary students in 3rd through 6th grade in reading, language arts, and math. In a school with 50% Spanish surnamed, 9th grade algebra students on a 45/15 plan performed worse than a control school.

3.                  My conclusion: There's no effect to be seen. These effects appear scattered across a lot of comparisons and could be random and insignificant.

Cooper, H.,  Nye, B., Charlton, K., Lindsay, J., Greathouse, S.  (1986) The effects of summer vacation on achievement test scores: A narrative and Meta-analytic review.  Bulletin of Educational Research, 66, 227-268.

1.                  This is a review of several empirical studies, one a very large federal one. No study reviewed involved an alternative year calendar. The studies compared the performance of children on different tests just before summer vacation with their performance when they return in the fall.  Any conclusions can only apply to a proposal to reduce summer vacation to ZERO.  The analysis is rather involved, but the results can be summarized.

2.                  It is surprising that this review has been used by advocates of changing the calendar because it is said in the discussion, that the data are not relevant to modifications in the summer calendar, [such as would be seen in going from a traditional to a year-round calendar]. Instead, it is set up, statistically,  to compare 12  weeks (or more) of summer with zero summer.

The present synthesis does not assess whether alternative calendars, such as those that include the present number of school days but distribute shorter and more frequent vacations throughout the year, are actually more effective than the present calendar.
(P 264, top)

3.                  Some students benefited from long summer vacations, some forgot things, but in most studies the net effect of summer vacation was close to zero. On average, students returned to school in the fall close to where they left off in the spring, with some forgetting of facts in which students had not become fluent.

4.                  There was some (weak) evidence that students diagnosed as learning disabled or considered to be at-risk showed some loss during the summer, especially where the memorization of facts was required. The overall effect is usually small, and depends on subject matter and economic advantage. A “stem-and-leaf” diagram (a type of data display taught in first-year Algebra in Alabama) shows that the bulk of the distribution of effects lies very close to zero, and that the mean is affected by points at the extremes of the distribution.

5.                  Concepts, reading skills, math concepts, grammar, and similar things (“knowing how to do something”) are relatively unaffected by the summer break. This form of knowledge is akin to knowing how to ride a bicycle or how to carry out well-practiced arithmetic tasks (“once you’ve learned to ride a bicycle....”). Computation, spelling, and science facts showed some loss. This type of learning is sometimes referred to as “knowing that,” as in knowing that WWII began in 1941. This might involve foreign language vocabulary, arithmetic facts (e.g., 9 X 7=63) and similar things. The study says nothing about when forgetting occurs.

2.                  The transition to year-round schooling alleviated much of the overcrowding. This is an important consideration in the analysis of any transition from traditional to multi-track calendars because the transition can often include sizeable reductions in class size, and such reductions can result in many improvements, including academics, morale, and "burn-out."

3.                  . “The year round school organization should be considered as instructional strategy to meet the needs of . . .  educational disadvantaged students . . . students who are in danger of dropping out of school and can make up work during intersessions, and limited-English proficient students who may benefit from a language acquisition program that provides for continuous learning throughout the year.” Unfortunately, the data don't support even this modest conclusion.

4.                  A more detailed picture is described in an ERS report of the San Diego experience (summarized below) and the picture there is much more mixed. Note that this change in the calendar included intersessions, another confound.   

O'Neil and Solomon. (1993) When less is more. The American School Board Journal. April. 39-41.

1.                  Encourages the use of year-round schooling as a solution to enrollment increases.          

2.                   ". . . year round schooling has not raised test scores, but neither has student achievement suffered."

3.                  My conclusion: Changing the calendar is inert as far as academics are concerned. If there are other reasons for the change, then fine, but don't pretend that simply changing the calendar will solve serious problems with academics.  

Campbell, W.D. (1994) Year-round schooling for academically at-risk students: Outcomes and perceptions of participants in an elementary program. ERS Spectrum, 12, Summer, 20-24.

1.                  This describes a 45-15, single track YRS with 60 second-grade Chapter 1 (Title 1) students in the YRS. 30 students from four  traditional schools were matched by “home school attendance data.”  This was done in the Carrollton City Schools, (OH).  Statistics were done by t tests. It compared test scores with the perceptions of students, parents, teachers and administrators.

2.                  On the objective measures, there was no significant difference in: 1) achievement gains, 2) absences, 3) promotion rates, 4) reading level or 5) books read. The number of books read came closest to “statistically significant” but the YRS students read fewer books than the traditional year students. 

3.                  On subjective measures, parents, students, and administrators overwhelmingly thought that the YRS helped on basic skills, and administrators also thought it helped attendance. The assessments of teachers, using subjective measures, came closest to the conclusions derived from the objective tests.

4.                   “Analysis of a number of student outcomes (basic skills gains, absences, promotion rates, number of books read, and reading levels) found no significant differences in favor of the year-round students. However, students, administrators, and parents in this study generally believed that the year-round schedule produced benefits in some of these same student outcomes. When perceptions and statistically significant student outcomes were compared, teachers were more accurate in their perceptions.”

5.                  My conclusion: The "Hawthorne Effect," an organizational placebo effect, is a serious confound in that and any study that uses subjective measures from teachers or administrators rather than objective measures of student performance.  

ERS report # 7112. Report on  single-track year-round education in San Diego unified school district. (1994). 87 pages, 25 tables, 9 figures.

1.                  Detailed analysis of  San Diego elementary and middle schools. Some were on a single track year-round school, others were not.  The schools studied had been on their calendar for at least 10 years before the study began, and the study lasted for 3 years.

2.                  Studied only the stable students who had experienced the year-round school (or not, in controls), about 45% of the total population. Students in elementary schools on the year-round calendar did better than those on traditional calendars. In middle school, the reverse held: traditional schools outperformed the year-round schools. The information available on the middle schools was less comprehensive, however. No pre-test was available prior to converting to year-round calendar but the schools were roughly matched (as well as they could be) on socioeconomic status and other demographics.

3.                  There were more student absences in the single-track year-round school, especially in the summer. This resulted in appreciable loss of state revenue, since state funding is based on the number of “student-days,” as is the case in Alabama.

Kneese, C  and Knight J. (1995), Investigating the effects of single-track year-round education on achievement of at-risk students. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Apr. 18-22, San Francisco, CA.

1.                  This is a two- page transcript of a paper read at the American Educational Research Association. It is very brief and evidently has not been published in the open literature. It describes 10  “dual-track” schools (grades 4, 5, 6) in an urban school district “in the Southwest.”  In the dual track school, some students are on “year-round” and some are on a traditional school calendar (TSC). It is not clear how this decision was made for any particular student. Each student on the YRS calendar had two matched students on the YRS calendar: one matched for score on a reading test and another matched for score on a mathematics test.

2.                  The matching and statistics procedures described seemed sophisticated and competently performed.

3.                  YRS students generally outperformed TSC students, and the effects were also seen in at-risk students. No details are provided about other interventions accompanying YRS, about how students elected to go on YRS calendar in the first place, and the makeup of the student population. The difficulty with this study is that it is very brief, unpublished, and does not provide the information required to determine what caused the effects reported.

4.                  In a recent published review of research on year-round calendars (Kneese, C.C. Review of research on student learning in year-round education.  Journal of Research and Development in Education. 1996, 29, 60-71), the senior author, concluded that “practitioners moving toward year-round education have little basis to expect that in and of itself YRE will significantly accelerate achievement unless a dedicated movement to educational reform, including factors such as utilization of the intersession for remediation and curricula changes is accomplished.” 

             Kneese also noted noted that some benefits attributed to year-round calendars could represent a  “Hawthorne Effect.” This is a sort of institutional placebo effect. When an institution experiences a change, even as innocuous as the type of lighting, there is a transient effect on performance and then things return to the previous status.

Roby, D.E. (1995). Comparison of a year-round school and a tradition school: reading and mathematics achievement.  ERS Spectrum. 1995, 7-10.

1.                  Brief, sketchily detailed study. Subjects were "a sample" of 6th grade students in the two schools being compared (74 students in one school, 65 in the other). The study was conducted by a principal in the school district, who was an author of one of the dissertations reviewed by Kneese.

2.                  There were some ambiguities in the description of the statistical analysis. The "effect sizes" (a statistical tactic that compares the difference between two means in terms of variability in the sample),  reported were much larger than typically found in this literature (between 1 and 3 standard deviations compared with 0 to 0.1 standard deviations in other studies). Even so, some effects were statistically significant, others were not. This is odd and difficult to reconcile. One interpretation is that there was a lot of noise in the samples.

3.                  The students in the YRS school did better on math and reading than those in the traditional calendar.

4.                  One thing is noteworthy. The year-round school changed calendars to alleviate a severe overcrowding problem. After the transition, this school and the comparison school had roughly equal class sizes.

5.                  My interpretation: One interpretation is that the relief from overcrowding was a powerful influence over the results. Another is that the statistical analysis is not appropriate to the structure of the data that they had. Finally, since they only compared two schools and the effect was seen in math and reading scores: one school may have had  better math and reading programs than the other.  

 ERS Report # 7113.  Evaluation of the changes at Caldwell Elementary (Memphis, Tennessee) 1995-96. 77 pages, 14 tables, 3 figures.

1.                  Page 19 summarizes the effects as rather mixed. "The percentile scores of Caldwell students in grades 3 and 6 improved from 1995 to 1996 on each of the five major subtests. In grade 2, the percentile scores . . . improved in social studies but declined in the other four sub-tests. In grades 4 and 5, the percentile scores . .. were lower in 1996 than in 1995 of all five major subtests. In 1995, Caldwell's percentiles were below the district's percentiles in 22 of 25 grade levels and subtests and, in 1996, Caldwell was below the district in 23 of 25 grade levels and subtests.

2.                  Oddly enough, the teachers who were interviewed claimed that the shorter breaks contributed to greater retention. It is important to note that many changes were implemented, including an after-school tutoring program.

3.                  There was no effects on student attendance (rates were within 0.3% of one another).

4.                  Interpretation: No consistent effects. Some got better, some got worse, about what you would expect from a lot of random flux

 

 ERS report # 7111. Evaluation of the three-year year-round education pilot program.: Irving (TX) independent school district, 1995. 86 pages, 12 tables, 3 figures.

4.                  They did a pretest in May 1994 and a posttest in May 1995. All groups improved. Even those who moved out to a traditional year calendar. While there is much discussion of impressions of how the YRS helped, there was no statistically significant effect of “group.” That is, it did not matter whether the students stayed, moved in, or moved out.

Curry, Janice; Washington, Wanda: Zyskowski, Gloria. (1997 ) Year-round schools evaluation, 1996-1997. Executive summary.

Later information relating to the Austin school system study reviewed below:

                  In an item on National Public Radio's Sunday Edition (25 October 1998) it was reported that Austin (Texas) Independent School System fabricated the test scores of Hispanic and African American students. The tests fabricated, the TAAS (achievement tests used by the state of Texas) are used to rate schools and districts, carry great weight in policy decisions, are noticed by businesses considering relocation, and by house hunters looking for school districts. In all cases of fabrication, low scores were made higher, apparently in an effort to prevent a school from failing to meet state standards.

When I reviewed the nine studies cited in a report by the Auburn (Alabama) City Schools, only one citation (Curry et al.,1997) credibly supported that claim. That one was a long (greater than 80-page), detailed report describing the scores of Hispanic and African-American students on the TAAS in the Austin Independent School District. We now know that those scores are tainted by this fabrication.

It is NOT the contention here that the authors had anything to do with the fabrication or that they were aware of it. Rather, it is the case that the data provided to them for the analysis may have been tainted.  

This report summarizes the experience of 12 elementary schools in Austin Texas that went to a single-track year-round school. The accompanying report is greater than 130 pages long (and I read it and incorporated that into the summary below). The authors conclude that YRS was beneficial in these elementary schools, whose demographics were very different from Auburn’s, but that YRS was so disruptive at the middle school that it should not be continued there. YRS was not imposed in isolation, but accompanied by other reforms that varied across the different schools. Overall the results would be encouraging to people in similar school districts, but see caution above) as more improvements than declines were noted. Some details about this report are important:

 Evans, R.A. (1978) A comparative analysis of the 45-15 plan and the traditional calendar in the Prince William county Public Schools of Virginia. Executive Summary. {from ERIC summary}

1.                    "...education afforded by the two plans did not differ but attitudes about them were considerably polarized."  

Anon (1987) Year-round schools. "What research says about" series. Number 8. National Education Association data search.  {from ERIC summary}.

1.              "The review found inconclusive evidence linking year-round schools to an increase in student academic achievement. Year-round schools can lead to a moderate savings in potential building costs are considered, but higher costs if potential building costs are not considered."  

 Howell, V.T. (1988) An examination of year-round education: Pros and cons that challenge schooling in America. Evaluative report. {from ERIC Summary}.

1.              "Converting to YRE creates many difficulties and shows no clear advantages. The only systems benefiting over time are those for whom overcrowding had become a devastating problem."  

Rasberry, Quinn (1992). Year-round schools may not be the answer. (ERIC accession number ED353658). {From Eric Summary}

1.                  “Three large urban school districts (Los Angeles, Houston, and Prince William County, VA) experimenting with year-round education found no significant positive effects on academic achievement. In two other districts (Lodi, California, and Orange County, Florida) other factors may account for increased student achievement.”

2.                    “. . . year-round schools are not cost-effective to operate unless the student population substantially exceeds traditional school capacity . . . there are increased expenses for air conditioning, maintenance, and staff salaries.”  

 Rogers, L. (1993) The pros and cons of year-round education at the elementary school level. Unpublished thesis. {From ERIC Summary}.