Complete Coverage

How Much Time for Learning? A Tour of the Archives

Contributors to Education Week ’s Commentary section needed little encouragement from the drafters of A Nation at Risk to contemplate the question of how best to deploy school time to improve student achievement. Variations on the theme of time and learning have been a staple for Commentary writers. Below is a sampling from our archives:

Research has shown consistently that the one constant in explaining how much students learn in virtually any situation is “time on task,” defined as how much time a student spends actively attending to the learning task at hand. This factor seems to hold for teaching 1st graders to read, army recruits to fire a rifle, quarterbacks to throw a football, or auto mechanics to tune an engine. No matter what skill or understanding is being taught, and no matter to whom, the one abiding factor crucial to the success of the process is time on task.

So it would seem there is little mystery about what might be “wrong” with America’s education system, or what might be done to fix it. Our students simply do not spend enough time actively engaged in learning, whether in school or at home. If we think Americans can learn as much as others while putting forth half the effort, we are just not cognizant of one of the obvious lessons of education research. A student cannot learn if he or she is not actively engaged in the process. Learning does not occur by osmosis. It...