An interesting paper about school schedules and student performance, published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, “How the Time of Day Affects Productivity: Evidence from School Schedules.” Here is the abstract:
Increasing the efficiency of the school system is a primary focus
of policymakers. I analyze how the time of day affects students’ productivity
and if efficiency gains can be obtained by rearranging the order of tasks they
perform throughout the school day. Using a panel data set of nearly 2 million
sixth- through eleventh-grade students in Los Angeles County, I perform
within-teacher, class type, and student estimation of the time-of-day effect
on students’ learning as measured by GPA and state test scores. I find that
given a school start time, students learn more in the morning than later in
the school day. Having a morning instead of afternoon math or English class
increases a student’s GPA by 0.072 (0.006) and 0.032 (0.006), respectively.
A morning math class increases state test scores by an amount equivalent
to increasing teacher quality by one-fourth standard deviation or half of the
gender gap. Rearranging school schedules can lead to increased academic
performance.
At first this would seem contrary to the evidence that suggests that later school start times seem to benefit students, but the author addresses this:
My study is also related to the school start time literature.
Research has indicated that due to changing sleep patterns
during adolescence, academic gains can be achieved by starting
school later. Carrel, Maghakian, and West (2011) use
random assignment of college classes and find that having one
hour earlier start times decreases students’ GPA by 0.031 to
0.076 standard deviations. Similarly, Dills and HernandezJulian
(2008) find that even when controlling for course
and student characteristics, students perform worse in earlier
classes. Edwards (2012) uses variation in school start times
produced by staggered busing schedules and finds that starting
school an hour later increases test scores by 2 percentage
points.
Some have interpreted the finding that later school start
times increase students’ academic performance as implying
that given a school start time, students perform better
in the afternoon than in the morning (Carrel et al., 2011;
Dills & Hernandez-Julian, 2008). However, this hypothesis
has not been tested empirically. The common conclusion is
that later start times increase students’ achievement because
students are less sleep deprived. However, this says nothing
about how teaching and learning ability change throughout
the day. School start times affect the average learning in a day
but not differential learning throughout the day. Therefore,
the results of this paper and the school start time literature
estimate slightly different effects.
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