Stopping the "Summer Slide": The highs and lows of intervention research

This paper will focus on collaborative studies with other staff and with PhD students that show negative Matthew effects for "at risk" children in primary school which are exacerbated even further by the negative academic impact of the "summer slide" where achivement drops over the summer holidays. Research on summer loss has found that students lose ground in academic achievement during the summer holidays, especially those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and that this leads to negative Matthew effects in that the gap between good and poor readers that builds during the school year is widened even further over the summer break.

The literature on summer slide has found that students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds lose ground in reading achievement over the summer holidays. As Mraz & Rasinski (2007) write, "Far from being an intuitive perception in the minds of educators, the reality of summer loss is well documented - and is more persistent among students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who are already at risk for academic failure" (p. 785).

A range of studies will show not only thenegative Matthew effects and summer slide but also willdescribe different intervention studies we have done to close the gap between pupils who are "at risk" and not "at risk". Statistical analysis for these studies has mostly involved analysis of variance (ANOVA) repeated measures.

Intervention research can be highly rewarding, useful, and a lot of fun - but it is also high risk in that what happens if the results are not significant? The paper will also discuss ways of making an intervention study fail-proof - or, if it does not achieve its goals, ways to make it publishable.