Increased instruction hours and the widening gap in student performance

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in March 2016Abstract Do increased instruction hours improve the performance of all students? Using PISA scores of students in ninth grade, we analyse the effect of a German education reform that increased weekly instruction hours by two hours (6.5 percent) over almost five years. In the additional time, students are taught new learning content. On average, the reform improves student performance. However, treatment effects are small and differ across the student performance distribution. While low-performing students do not benefit, highperforming students benefit the most. The findings suggest that increases in instruction hours can widen the gap between low-and high-performing students.

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

“…Raising instructional time -the allocated number of hours per year that students spend in formal classroom settings -is often found to have positive effects on cognitive skills such as maths and language ability (Bellei, 2009;Cortes and Goodman, 2014;Taylor, 2014), as well as standardised maths, reading, and scientific literacy test scores (Andrietti, 2016;Cattaneo et al, 2016;Huebener et al, 2017). 1 Differences in instructional time between countries are also found to account for some of the observed international gaps in student achievement (Lavy, 2015;.…”

“…This type of behaviour can cover a broad range of actions such as helping, sharing, and other forms of cooperation (Batson and Powell, 2003), and is distinct from altruism in that it is not purely motivated by increasing another individual's welfare, but can be motivated by, for example, empathy, reciprocity, or self-image (Evren and Minardi, 2017). 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).…”

“…6 Next to this literature in economics stands a large body of literature in political science on the relationship 4 to the literature on instructional time (Bellei, 2009;Cortes and Goodman, 2014;Cortes et al, 2015;Herrmann and Rockoff, 2012;Taylor, 2014), and in particular, to the stream that exploits the "G8" reform as a source of exogenous variation: since the first data became available, the reform has been used -due to its features -as a laboratory for empirical research in educational economics. The more sophisticated studies use difference-in-differences designs that exploit variation in its implementation across federal states and school cohorts; they examine its effects on graduation age, grade repetition, and graduation rates (Huebener and Marcus, 2015), postsecondary educational choices , performance (Andrietti, 2016;Homuth, 2012;Huebener et al, 2017), health (Quis and Reif, 2017), and well-being (Quis, 2015). 7 Here, the studies that are methodologically most closely related to ours are Dahmann and Anger (2014) and Dahmann (2017): we use the same dataset and a similar specification as these authors, who show that the reform affects personality traits, and to some extent, cognitive skills.…”

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

“…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).…”

“…This is an important refinement as the first treated cohort graduated under particular conditions: Due to the nature of the reform, the first treatment cohort graduated from school in the same year as the last control cohort. Therefore, students in this cohort might have different performance 1 Other studies evaluate the reform effect on student performance in ninth grade when the reform serves as a quasi-experiment to estimate the effect of increased instruction time (Huebener et al 2016 find small positive average effects, stronger improvements among high-performing students), on non-cognitive skills (Thiel et al 2014; Dahmann & Anger 2014 provide mixed evidence), and on measures of crystalline and fluid intelligence (Dahmann 2015 finds no general effect, but some evidence for improvements among males). For overviews on further recent findings on the G8-reform, see Huebener & Marcus (2015) and .…”