The more, the better? The impact of instructional time on student performance

Maria A. Cattaneo, Chantal Oggenfuss and Stefan Wolter
Additional contact information
Maria A. Cattaneo: Swiss Coordination Center for Research in Education
Chantal Oggenfuss: Swiss Coordination Center for Research in Education

No 115, Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW)

Abstract: Although instruction time is an important and costly resource in education production, there is a remarkable scarcity of research examining the effectiveness of its use. We build on the work of Lavy (2015) using the variance of subject-specific instruction time within Switzerland to determine the causal impact of instruction time on student test scores, as measured by the international PISA test (2009). We extend the analyses in two ways and find that students must differ considerably in the time needed to learn. This difference is supported by our findings that the effectiveness of instructional time varies substantially between different school (ability) tracks and that additional instruction time significantly increases the within-school variance of subject-specific test scores.

Keywords: instruction time; PISA; fixed-effect models; tracking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 I21 I25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2016-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-edu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.business.uzh.ch/RePEc/iso/leadinghouse/0115_lhwpaper.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The More, the Better? The Impact of Instructional Time on Student Performance (2016)
Working Paper: The More, the Better? The Impact of Instructional Time on Student Performance (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iso:educat:0115

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sara Brunner ().