Instruction Time, Classroom Quality, and Academic Achievement

Abstract

Many countries, American jurisdictions and charter schools have recently embraced longer school days or more time devoted to core academic classes. Recent research generally supports the notion that additional time raises achievement, though difficulties isolating an exogenous source of variation raise questions about the strength of much of the evidence. Moreover, it seems likely that the magnitude of any causal link between achievement and instruction time depends upon the quality of instruction, the classroom environment, and the rate at which students translate classroom time into added knowledge. In this paper we use panel data methods to investigate the pattern of instruction time effects in the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data. The empirical analysis shows that achievement increases with instruction time and that the increase varies by both amount of time and classroom environment. These results indicate that school circumstances are important determinants of the likely benefits and desirability of increased instruction time.

Do Longer School Days Improve Student Achievement?: Evidence from Colombia

“…However, the estimated effect for developing countries was much lower than the effect size in developed countries. Rivkin and Schiman (2015) looked at the relation between instructional time and the 2009 PISA test scores results for 72 countries. They also found that achievement increases with more instructional time, and that the increase varies by the amount of time and classroom environment.…”

Compressing instruction time into fewer years of schooling and the impact on student performance

“…One likely reason for our finding of weaker school performance is that students may benefit at a diminishing rate from additional instruction hours on longer school days. Rivkin & Schiman (2015) provide evidence of such diminishing benefits of additional instruction hours in international PISA data, which suggests that this is not specific to the German reform. Furthermore, covering additional curriculum content in a shorter period of time on longer school days may overstretch at least some students.…”

“…There are at least two explanations that can rationalise the findings. First, fatigue and the declining concentration of students over the extended school days may diminish the benefits of additional instruction time on a given day (Rivkin & Schiman, 2015). Second, students may lack the maturity or fail to carry out sufficient preparation to enable them to process the curriculum content that now appears relatively earlier in their academic careers.…”

“…Marcotte, 2007;Sims, 2008;Fitzpatrick et al, 2011;Herrmann & Rockoff, 2012) or increases in the number of instruction hours provided in a given time period (e.g. Taylor, 2014;Cortes et al, 2015;Lavy, 2015;Rivkin & Schiman, 2015;Huebener et al, 2016) tend to improve student performance.Regarding the second strand, there is a large economic literature on the benefits of additional years of schooling (e.g. Card, 1999;Lochner, 2011).…”

Can Raising Instructional Time Crowd Out Student Pro-Social Behaviour? Evidence from Germany

“…Pro-social behaviour, and in particular volunteering, is linked to various positive outcomes: at the societal level, it can help build social capital through fostering cooperation and trust and through promoting citizenship (Putnam, 2000), and social capital is linked to higher levels of subjective well-being in societies (Helliwell et al, 2011); at the individual level, it is found to nurture important cognitive and non-cognitive skills that can improve individual 1 There is growing evidence that the effect of raising instructional time on student learning and performance is heterogeneous, and in particular, that higher-performing students tend to benefit relatively more (Cattaneo et al, 2016;Huebener et al, 2017). 2 The importance of instructional time for student achievement varies between educational systems, and in particular, between developed and developing countries (Woessmann, 2016), pointing towards potentially important complementarities in educational production, for example, between instructional time and teacher quality or effective classroom management techniques (Rivkin and Schiman, 2015). 1 labour market outcomes, to have positive physical and mental health benefits, and to raise subjective well-being over and beyond other benefits (Wilson and Musick, 2012), as confirmed in both observational (Binder and Freytag, 2013;Borgnonovi, 2008;Meier and Stutzer, 2008) and experimental studies Aknin et al, 2008).…”