It's time to learn: understanding the differences in returns to instruction time

Andres Barrios-Fernández and Giulia Bovini

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: As hours per day are inherently a limited resource, increasing daily instruction time reduces the amount of time pupils can dedicate to other activities outside school. We study how the effect of longer school days on achievement varies across students and schools. We exploit a large-scale reform of school schedules that substantially increased daily instruction time in Chilean primary schools. We show that the average effect of one additional year of exposure to the longer school day on reading and on mathematics test scores at the end of grade 4 masks substantial heterogeneity. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds benefit more from longer schedules, indicating that returns to time spent at school are larger the scarcer the learning opportunities available at home. Added instruction time yields higher gains in charter than in public schools, suggesting that more autonomy on administrative and pedagogical decisions may increase the effectiveness of other school inputs.

Keywords: instruction time; education reform; heterogeneous effects; charter schools (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 I24 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-12-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: It’s time to learn: School institutions and returns to instruction time (2021)
Working Paper: It’s time to learn: understanding the differences in returns to instruction time (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1521

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