Thus, they tended to do their research based upon what real teachers did with real students within real classrooms. In so doing, these researchers both gained and lost something. What they gained was the ability to observe learning in the real-life school settings in which they were primarily interested and to which they aspired to generalize their research.
What they lost was any real degree of control over the research setting, in the sense that they had to deal with (a) much more diverse students who, unlike the undergraduates participating in paired-associate experiments, could not always read or understand directions; (b) teachers who potentially could vary in their instructional ability and conscientiousness; and (c) tests that weren’t designed to match what students were taught (i.e., standardized achievement measures). Still, some of this research, much of it conducted before the fi eld’s steroidal boosts in the mid to late 1970s — which I attribute to (a) Gene Glass’ popularization of meta-analysis 5 (that, among other things, defi nitively demonstrated the positive learning effects of small class size 6 ) and (b) Benjamin Bloom’s emergence as the preeminent learning theorists/ researcher of the 1970s and 1980s 7 — did uncover some very interesting findings, even if none quite transcended the “grandmother principle.”
Some of the more important of these fi ndings as they relate to school learning included:
Increased Instructional Time (or Time-on-Task)
Despite the obvious differences in settings, the classic learning principle that more instructional time (although classic learning researchers seldom labeled their presentation of nonsense syllables instruction ) results in greater learning did indeed apply to the classroom. In its most elemental form, the more time that is allocated to teach a topic, the more students will learn.
In fact, the amount of instructional exposure is one of the strongest determinants of school learning yet discovered. Of course none of this would come as a surprise to anyone’s grandmother. Neither would secondary evidence showing that children who are assigned homework (which, after all, translates to extra time-on-task) learn more than those who do not 10 or that those who attend summer school (which involves increased instructional time) learn more (or forget less) than those who do not.
Other similarly obvious manifestations of the relationship between instructional time and learning include the negative impact of school absences and even tardiness. Strangely, given its obvious importance, as far as I’m aware no one made a serious attempt to document the dose–response relationship between the amount of school instruction until the mid-1970s, when David Wiley and Annegret Harnischfeger 13 conducted a secondary analysis of data from 40 Detroit schools contained in the Equality of Educational Opportunity Survey. Defining the number of hours of schooling delivered to students in any given school, they used the following simple formula:
[# Hours of Instruction Delivered = Daily Attendance (which encompasses
absences) x # Hours in the School Day x # days in the School Year]
They found huge discrepancies in the total number of hours of schooling in this one city, ranging from 710 to 1,150 hours per year. “Typical pupils in some schools receive 50 % more schooling than pupils in other schools.” Then, controlling for student characteristics as best they could, they found that “over a year’s period … in schools where students receive 24 % more schooling, they will increase their average gain in reading comprehension by two-thirds and their gains in mathematics and verbal skills by more than one-third” (p. 9).
Needless to say, this finding reflects an extremely powerful relationship between the amount of school instruction and student learning. Yet, as powerful a factor as the amount of instructional time is, historically it has not been found to be the most powerful determinant factor influencing school learning. That distinction belongs to a relationship that was probably recognized the first time children were ever grouped together in classrooms.
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