Summer Scholars

Students who participated in Summer Scholars’ Signature Summer Learning Program made great strides in their reading skills… and we have the numbers to prove it!

Summer Scholars uses the DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) assessment at the beginning of our programs to determine each student’s individual literacy learning needs. DIBELS testing at the end of our programs allows us to measure each student’s progress, as well as to evaluate our program’s overall effectiveness.

The DIBELS measures several fundamental literacy skills that are the building blocks for fluent reading, as well as overall reading fluency and reading comprehension. And in all categories, our summer students’ average gains were in the double digits!

Here is a breakdown:

• Our youngest scholars’ ability to recognize and name letters increased, on average, 18.39 percent.

• Phoneme segmentation – the ability to segment words into individual sounds, or phonemes – is a reliable predictor of later reading achievement. Students’ abilities in this area increased, on average, by 30.92 percent.

• Students’ abilities to identify the correct sounds made by each letter in a word increased, on average, by 10.87 percent.

• Students’ abilities to correctly identify whole words – often by using phoneme segmentation to “sound out” words – increased by a whopping 39.29 percent.

• In overall reading fluency, students made average gains of 11.47 percent.

• In the area of reading comprehension, students’ abilities to understand and re-tell what they just read grew, on average, by 19.03 percent.
  

These numbers provide powerful evidence that Summer Scholars signature summer program significantly increased the literacy skills of the at-risk students we served. Of course, this vitally important work in improving student achievement would not be possible without friends like you.

So we say THANK YOU for making a real difference in the lives of struggling readers. Your support has truly helped our scholars build more solid foundations for ongoing academic success.