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High school students who change their class schedules after the start of the school year may miss class time before their schedules are finalized. This loss of class time is expected to lead to a loss of learning opportunities, and thus to lower student achievement. We examine a school with an unexpectedly large number of such schedule changes. Contrary to our expectation, students who were not in class because they were changing schedules had achievement equal to students who were in class, even when the students changing schedules missed many days of class. While this indicates that students were not penalized for schedule changes, it also suggests that all students had reduced opportunities to learn.
Introduction
Time is an important school resource. Research consistently shows that more instructional time leads to higher achievement (see, for example, Wiley, 1976; Karweit and Slavin, 1981; Dreeben & Gamoran, 1986). By itself, time is not sufficient for learning. Numerous other factors, including individual student ability, teachers' quality of instruction, and school organization, are involved (Carroll, 1985; Hallinan, 1987; Kilgore & Pendleton, 1993). However, time is a minimum condition for learning because it sets the boundaries for teachers' opportunities to teach and students' opportunities to learn. Without time available for the teaching of academic material, students will not be exposed to such material, and therefore will be unable to learn it. For this reason, school policies that decrease the amount of time available for teaching and learning should be discouraged.
Time is a limited school resource and, in high schools, is structured according to both school and student schedules. Teachers' schedules set the maximum amount of instructional time they will have for a particular class. Students' schedules set the maximum number of hours they will be exposed to that course material during the school day. The typical teacher in high school has approximately 75 hours of class time to present a semester's worth of material (National Education Commission on Time and Learning, 1994).
The amount of classroom time available for learning is reduced in many ways. Whole school events such as fire drills, assemblies, and school announcements may remove students from the classroom or otherwise prevent instruction during that time. Within the classroom, teachers spend time on classroom management,...