Best Practices in Increasing Academic Learning Time

How children spend their time in classrooms continues to be a topic of importance for teachers, school psychologists, administrators, and educational researchers. Recently, researchers concluded that as little as half of each school day may be devoted to instruction in some classrooms, and engagement rates among students may range from as low as 50% up to 90%, depending on teachers’ managerial competencies, type of instruction, grouping practices, or individual student characteristics (Hollowood, Salisbury, Rainforth, & Palombaro, 1995). Interest in learning time can be traced to Carroll’s (1963) original model of school learning, which hypothesized that learning is a function of time engaged relative to time needed for learning. The earliest and most extensive research program to examine the relationship between learning time and achievement was the Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study (BTES) (Denham & Lieberman, 1980). The purpose of BTES was to identify teaching activities and classroom conditions that promote student learning. Based on observations in classrooms over a 6-year period, BTES researchers arrived at the concept of academic learning time (ALT). Briefly, ALT is the amount of time during which students are actively, successfully, and productively engaged in learning (Fisher & Berliner, 1985). Perhaps the most significant finding from the BTES project was that ALT is a strong determinant of academic achievement. Among the many variables that contribute to student achievement, ALT has been accorded special significance by educators because of the significance of the BTES findings and because components of ALT are viewed as manipulable facets of classrooms that teachers may be able to control. Research on effective teaching has identified evidence-based practices that strive to maximize learning time for all students (Gettinger & Stoiber, 1999). Given the significance of time as a determinant of learning, the purpose of this chapter is to describe best practices for working with teachers to evaluate, extend, and enhance ALT. The following discussion of basic considerations focuses on (a) defining academic learning time and its constituent parts and (b) describing procedures to assess current levels of learning time and identify classroom practices that contribute to ALT. The section on best practices describes strategies for increasing academic learning time that can be offered to classroom teachers through collaboration, consultation, or inservice training by school psychologists.