"January Undergraduate Move Ahead Program" (JUMP) uses winter break as an opportunity to prepare small groups of scholarship students with high financial need for the second semester of their first-year biology curriculum and a career in life science. A winter intersession program has challenges, but more importantly, benefits that…

Just like physical skills, cognitive skills grow rusty over time unless they are regularly used and practiced so academic breaks can have negative consequences on student learning and success. The Keeping in School Shape (KiSS) program is an engaging, innovative, and cost-effective intervention that harnesses the benefits of retrieval practice by…

Catching students up who have fallen behind academically is a key challenge for educators, and can be difficult to do in a cost-effective manner. This field experiment examines the causal effect of a program designed to provide struggling sixth and seventh graders with math instruction delivered in small groups of roughly ten students by select…

Developmental interventions for reading and writing often take place at community colleges during the winter or summer. These brief, intersession workshops are examples of compressed acceleration, as they give students the opportunity to exit developmental coursework and enroll in credit bearing courses the following semester. As college readiness…

How do we make of students learning something their teacher did not intend to teach? Researchers suggest it unnecessary extras, learning of implicit rules of the game, or keys to understand power structure. Based on an ethnographic fieldwork of a college alternative break trip to learn about poverty through simulation, this article suggests such…

Sandwich programmes are an innovation in teacher education geared towards the production of high quality manpower. They are organized during school vacations so that teachers working full-time would also have the opportunity to advance academically and improve professionally. However, the intensive nature of the programme jeopardizes the…

As institutions seek to offer students an educational experience equipped with opportunities to develop as not only active learners but also engaged citizens, service-learning initiatives in the form of alternative spring breaks (ASB) have become prevalent. This study examines the potential of ASBs, as service-learning initiatives, to deliver a…

This study examined the potential impact of a week-long cocurricular community service-learning (CSL) program on undergraduate students' psychosocial development. Participants in the Alternative Spring Break program and a matched control group completed surveys assessing a number of psychosocial variables immediately before and after the program,…

This study was conducted to: (1) determine if the intercession calendar, an alternative calendar that reduces the total school year for students who do not need remediation, positively impacts overall student achievement; (2) to assess the explanatory ability of the intercession model in accounting for student academic achievement variability; and…

This paper examines the parents', staff members', and students' satisfaction with the intersession activities of a year-round elementary school. "Intersession" is defined as the period of time when students receive remediation in problem areas. The school cited in the report was chosen from a district that had recently implemented a…

This paper presents findings of a study that explored parent satisfaction with Year-Round Education (YRE) and its impact on family lives. Data were gathered through 20 interviews with parents of children who attended 2 elementary schools during the first year of a year-round pilot program in a large suburb adjacent to a midwestern city.…

This 10-year follow-up three-part evaluation describes how well the City of Buena Vista (Virginia) Public Schools implemented a year-round school program for high school students. The focus of the program was the organization and development of a tuition-free extended-school-year quarter plan that included a voluntary fourth quarter. The…

A quasi-experimental approach was used to study the effect of different types of summer programs in Alberta (Canada) on the skills and behaviors of severely handicapped children ages 2 1/2 to 18 years. The experimental group, composed of 98 students, were enrolled in 6-week summer programs characterized as high structure (emphasizing specific…

There is no lack of debate regarding year-round schooling. Emotions run high when school districts tamper with the "traditional" agrarian school calendar and adapt a year-round calendar. This study examines one program in a multi-track year-round elementary school, a tutoring program delivered during the students' intersession. Through…

Examined factors that might influence diverse high school students' levels of participation in intersession programs provided by a year-round education program at an urban high school. Analysis of data from student records indicated that levels of participation varied as a function of students' gender, race, grade level, and level of academic…