Student Assessment

The main concern with these summer courses is that the learning environment primes students to encode most of the knowledge they’ve gained as short-term memory. Given the relatively short timeframe of these courses and the mental stress that comes with it, traditional pedagogies used in full terms are not as effective at developing and enhancing student’s long-term memory (Vogel & Schwabe, 2016). Oftentimes, summer courses are still structured in a manner where students complete cumulative assignments that only use lower-level thinking such as memorization. Although this promotes the improvement of students’ knowledge retrieval, the retention of the information gained greatly decays over time as the mental process of fast-paced learning mostly engages the brain’s hippocampus which is where new memories are formed and retrieved from (Jonides & al., 2008; Schapiro & al., 2017; VanElzakker, 2008).