Does Instructional Time Length Impact Student Achievement?: Action Research Study

Students’ academic success is affected by many resource factors, not least of which is time. Time plays a major role in how students succeed, whether it’s time spent on instructional activities, time spent on test preparation, or time spent interacting face-to-face with classmates and teachers. Every year you can find headlines in the news and research articles showing how the U.S. is behind in academic achievement compared to other nations, with much of the focus on the length of the school year, week, or day. And while there are many different scheduling structures, with advantages and disadvantages to both, does instructional time really impact student-learning achievements in small time increments.

At my cooperating center I taught two sections of my Ag Sciences II-IV classes. This class was taught with the same course material in two different sections, the first being taught during 3^rd period, the standard 45-minute length, while the other is during 5^th period, a 60-minute length period to accommodate the two 30-minute lunch periods that overlap with it. There was no difference between which students were placed into which section other than whichever fit better into their overall class schedule.

To determine if time really does matter, I conducted my action research study by comparing the grades of the students in both sections against each other, using their second term grade as their starting point and their third term grade as their end point. I compared the overall change in grade, whether it was positive or negative, of each individual student and the average for the class. Each student also took a cumulative unit exam and the individual scores and class averages were also calculated and compared between the two sections. The only differences in class instruction for the two sections were that 5^th period, the second, longer section, received more in-class time to complete assignments, more opportunities to ask clarifying questions, and during certain lessons received additional examples to explain lesson objectives and content.

After collecting and analyzing my data the results I found showed that yes the students in the 5^th period section of the class did receive higher grades on the cumulative exam than the 3^rd period section, with an average grade of 84.79 in 3^rd period and 96.18 in 5^th period. The 5^th period students also had higher class grades than their peers with the average second term grade being 89.79 and average third term grade being 90.71, as compared to the 3^rd period students with an average second term grade of 80.13 and average third term grade of 84.6.  However, upon looking at the data further I find that while the 5^th period students did have the higher grades overall, it was the 3^rd period students who appeared the have the greatest change in grade from the second term to third term. The average change in grade for the 3^rd period class was an increase of 4.47 grade points, while the average change in grade for the 5^th period class only had an increase of 0.93 grade points.

Based on these results, I do not think that this study was able to show a correlation between longer class time and academic improvement, though I do believe that there were several other factors that impacted the study. The first is that in both 3^rd and 5^th period I have several students who, due to their personal class schedule constraints, are only able to attend class on either an A-day or a B-day, even though the class occurs on both schedule days. The second factor that I believe greatly impacted the study was the amount of instructional time lost due to weather. Over the course of my student teaching internship approximately 15 school days were impacted by winter weather conditions, either through early dismissals, late arrivals, or cancellations – which took away the majority of the instructional time.

Due to these factors my study wasn’t able to show if a difference in instructional time length impacted student achievement but it did make me more aware of the variety of factors that can impact instructional time, including seasonal weather.