The frequent need that students exhibit for greater academic and nonacademic support than can be offered during the regular school day is a widely documented challenge. Summer programs are a common tool that schools and districts employ to expand the time over which students have access to learning opportunities and resources. For the current…

During the latter half of the 20th Century, the early blooms of spring were also a signal to the nation's teenagers: it's time to find a job. About half of all Americans between 16 and 19 years old spent part of their summer break bagging groceries or slinging ice cream until the early 2000s. Then, the youth employment rate fell sharply and stayed…

Detroit students who obtain a college degree overcome many obstacles to do so. This article reports the results of a randomized evaluation of a program meant to provide support to low-income community college students. The Detroit Promise Path program was designed to complement an existing College Promise scholarship, providing students with…

Richard Allington reviews the nature of the reading achievement gap between students from low-income and high-income families, concluding that the limited access to children's books experienced by children from low-income families lies at the base of the problem. The fact that children from low-income families lose reading achievement every summer…

Participation in higher education affords low-income students with a pathway out of poverty. The federally funded Upward Bound program aims to improve the college-going rate of low-income and first-generation students. Relevant studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of the program. There is a gap in the research regarding whether some types…

Background and Context: With the growing movement to adopt critical framings of computing, scholars have worked to reframe computing education from the narrow development of programming skills to skills in identifying and resisting oppressive structures in computing. However, we have little guidance on how these framings may manifest in classroom…

Kindergarten transition programs support successful school transitions for families and may reduce disparities in academic readiness upon school entry. Yet, access and participation in high-quality summer transition programs are lower among children from disadvantaged backgrounds. This study examined the impact of a summer kindergarten transition…

This phenomenological research study investigated how participation in the Educational Opportunity Fund summer bridge program shaped first generation low-income students' learner identity as they entered college. Learner identity is generally defined as a learner's personally and socially constructed roles that influence his or her capacity,…

This study examined opportunities for enhancing transfer outcomes for community college students through summer research opportunities at a university. It emphasizes the significance of academic capital, derived from Bourdieu's cultural capital theory, in facilitating successful transfers. By offering ten-week paid summer research opportunities at…

The Engaged Engineering Program (EEP) project at ABC University is a five-year Track 2 NSF S-STEM that responds to challenges in recruiting and retaining academically talented, low-socioeconomic status students from diverse backgrounds into undergraduate engineering programs. The EEP project has successfully recruited four cohorts of Scholars and…

This qualitative case study explores student and staff perceptions of whether and how participation in pre-enrollment summer transition programs influenced the sense of belonging and preparedness of first-generation and limited-income students in their first year of college. These summer transition programs are provided as part of the Kessler…

The purpose of the study is to examine the impact of a summer learning loss prevention program that is designed to improve the academic achievement gap. The target population for this research study was participants of the Power Scholars Academy (PSA) program. PSA is a collaboration of BellXcel, local school districts, and community organizations.…

The purpose of this study was to explore the ways in which Black and Latinx undergraduate students of first-generation and low-socioeconomic backgrounds understand how the components of summer bridge programs influence their persistence at four-year colleges and universities. This generic interpretive study revealed that there are several…

Recently there has been an emphasis on how time spent outside of the classroom can affect student outcomes, including high school graduation, with the hope of closing academic achievement gaps along socioeconomic and racial lines. This paper provides experimental evidence regarding a particular type of out-of-school activity--early work…

Little is known about college students during their summer break between the first and second years of college, when some students may contemplate whether they will return to college. Using ethnographic method, this article addresses critical questions of low-income college students during their summer breaks of where they go, where they stay, and…