Improving Summer School Outcomes: An Evaluation of a Summer Education Program for 6th to 8th Grade Students

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the impact of a middle school summer education program conducted in the summer of 2012. The summer program provided math and reading instruction to rising 6th, 7th, and 8th graders from low-income families, in three underprivileged districts nation-wide. Using a random assignment method of analysis, we examined the overall impact of the summer program for math and reading outcomes, and found that the summer program had an effect equal to -0.04 for reading, and 0.02 for math, at statistically insignificant levels. Based on the structure of this program, these negligible findings were particularly unexpected and implored the question of what was it in this program’s implementation that led it to not have the anticipated large and positive impacts on student outcomes. In an attempt to ascertain what influenced this summer school’s success, we examined a number of program, student, and teacher factors, which based on prior research we hypothesized would have influenced the overall success of the program. Due to the power constraints of our dataset, we often did not find results that met conventionally accepted levels of statistical significance. Despite our lack of conclusive results, this thesis provides a thorough investigation of this particular middle school summer education program, and presents a number of theories as to why this program was not as successful as expected, and what aspects of the program, students, and teachers might have most strongly influenced the performance of the treatment students