The vast majority of young children who attend year-round schools do not learn more than their peers at schools with traditional calendars, a new study has found.
The U.S. research challenges one of the main arguments for abandoning conventional schedules: that year-round schooling improves achievement because it prevents students from falling behind during the summer and because it does not waste precious time reviewing past years' lessons.
"It appears that the learning and forgetting balance out about the same way on a year-round calendar as on a nine-month calendar," said Paul von Hippel, the study's author and a research statistician in sociology at Ohio State University.
Year-round schools spread the academic calendar over the whole year with more frequent breaks, but not more school days - which may explain why most year-round students did not learn more, he said.
Those involved in year-round schools still argue the modified schedules benefit their students.
"The children ... feel when they come back that they haven't forgotten everything they learned, and they'll say that themselves," said Joan Hamilton, principal of Roberta Bondar public school in Brampton, Ont. "I believe that our students are learning better."
The school, which has 1,050 students in kindergarten to Grade 8, began the 2007-2008 academic year - the school's third - on July 30. Students have two weeks off in October, three weeks at Christmas, one week in February, two weeks in March and one month in the summer.
Canada has 84 year-round schools, according to the National Association for Year-Round Education, a U.S. advocacy group. The U.S. has more than 3,000.
Prof. von Hippel, who is to present his findings today at a meeting of the American Sociological Association, found that kindergarteners and Grade 1 students had similar gains in math and reading test scores no matter what their school calendar. However, he found that the most disadvantaged students performed slightly better in reading skills. (Children were scored on everything from recognizing letters and numbers to reading and doing simple math.)
The study used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, a national survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Education. Prof. von Hippel, who adjusted results for socioeconomic status, examined test scores of about 17,000 children in 748 public and 244 private elementary schools between 1998 and 2000. Just 27 public schools had year-round calendars, which the paper notes is a limitation of the study. As well, the schools' tests were not written on the same date.
Carolyn Shields, an education professor at the University of Illinois who has studied year-round schooling, said the study partly confirms other research that has found such calendars benefit disadvantaged students.
But Prof. Shields said the paper's narrow focus on the first two years of school limits its scope. "It's not what happens in one year, it's what happens over time that I think is important," she said.
Prof. von Hippel said good data were not available for older children.
Jill Mahoney