The more time students are actively participating in instructional activities, the more they learn.

The instructional variable of time has two interrelated aspects: how much time is spent teaching and how much time is spent learning. Although these two aspects interact, it is important to note that increasing instructional time alone does not always lead to an increase in time that students spend learning or in the total amount learned. Thus the quantity of instruction can be seen as a necessary but not sufficient component of learning; the combination of quantity and quality of instruction is the key to student success. 

Several terms used in the teacher effectiveness literature are related to instructional and learning time. Understanding these terms is a prerequisite to understanding the research findings in this area.

Available Time:  Available time is the amount of time available for all activities during the school day/year. For example, if school hours run from 9 A.M. to 3 P.M. there are approximately 6 hours of available time per school day. Of course, other activities (lunch, taking attendance, etc.) automatically reduce the amount of time available for academic instruction/activities

Allocated Time: Allocated time is the amount of time dedicated for instruction in academic content (i.e., how much time a teacher allots or schedules for instruction in content areas, such as language arts, math, etc.). Some research in this area indicates that allocated time makes up about 70% or approximately 4 hours of the school day, with the remainder used for noninstructional activities. Increasing allocated time appears to have a slight positive impact on student achievement (Anderson, 1976; Walberg, 1986). 

Engaged Time/Time On Task: Engaged time/time on task is the amount of time students are actively engaged in a learning task (e.g., listening to the teacher, solving a problem, listening to other students respond, taking notes, reading). Some research indicates that students are engaged during less than half of the time allocated for instruction, or approximately 2 hours per day (e.g., Anderson & Walberg, 1994; Haynes & Jenkins, 1986). The positive correlation between engaged time and achievement, while stronger than for allocated time, is still relatively modest. 

Academic Learning Time: Academic learning time (ALT) is the amount of time students are successfully engaged in academic tasks at the appropriate level of difficulty (i.e., not too hard or not too easy). There is some indication that ALT occurs, on average, for only a small percentage of the day (i.e., about 20% of allocated time or 50 minutes per day) in many classrooms (Fisher et al., 1978). Such a small percentage is unfortunate, given the strong link between ALT and achievement. It is worth noting that many elements of explicit instruction and many teaching techniques focus on increasing ALT. That is, they are designed to promote teaching appropriate tasks and increasing the amount of time students are engaged in these tasks at a high level of success.

The more successful (i.e., correct/accurate) students are when they engage in an academic task, the more they achieve. 

Increasing engaged time has a positive impact on student learning. However, it is when students are both engaged and successful that they learn the most. Merely engaging in a task or performing a skill is not useful if the percentage of errors is too high; in essence, students are spending their time practicing errors. Although student errors or incorrect responses are most likely to occur during initial instruction, you can make learning more efficient for students by minimizing and correcting these errors as soon as they occur. High success rates are positively correlated with increased learning outcomes; conversely, low rates of success are correlated with negative outcomes (Berliner, 1980). Brophy and Evertson (1976) analyzed the research on teacher effects and posited that optimal rates of correct responding should be about 80% during initial instruction and approximately 90–95% when students are engaged in independent practice. 

In order for high rates of success to occur during instruction, several design and delivery factors must be considered. Briefly, some of the factors that increase level of success include teaching material that is not too difficult (although scaffolding procedures allow teachers to teach skills that otherwise might be too advanced or difficult for students to learn through more minimally guided teaching approaches), clear presentations, dynamic modeling of skills and strategies, supported practice, active participation, careful monitoring of student responses, and immediate corrective feedback.

The more academic content covered effectively and efficiently, the greater potential for student learning. 

“Content coverage” refers to the amount of content actually presented (vs. time allocated) to students. Put another way, the more content that is covered well, the greater the potential for student learning. To distill this principle even further, we could say, “The more you teach, the more they learn.” A number of decisions affect the quality and quantity of content coverage, including what to teach, how to teach it, and how it will be practiced. 

Decisions about what to teach can be characterized as curricular decisions. You can increase content coverage by deciding what is important for your students to learn. Thus you can examine your curriculum, select critical skills and objectives, and discard or at least deemphasize those that are less critical. For example, you may decide that certain math skills (e.g., alternative bases, Roman numerals) may not be the most important skills to teach, and thus you may choose to spend more time covering more essential skills (e.g., computation, problem solving, measurement).

In addition, content coverage can be maximized when teachers focus on skills, strategies, concepts, or rules that will generalize to many other items or situations. For example, instead of teaching the pronunciation of each word as a specific entity, a teacher can introduce letter–sound associations and decoding strategies that can be applied to many words. Similarly, in preparing students for reading a passage, a teacher can examine the list of vocabulary terms and decide to stress terms necessary for passage comprehension and terms that would be encountered in the future, only briefly introducing the remaining words. Likewise, a social studies teacher may choose to introduce a “Big Idea” concerning historical events (Problem–Solution–Effects) and guide students in using this scheme to analyze numerous events (Kame’enui & Carnine, 1998). This teacher may also systematically introduce learning strategies for doing common classroom tasks, such as reading passages or writing a section summary. 

In addition to decisions about what should be taught, content coverage is influenced by how skills are taught and practiced. several instructional considerations are directly related to content coverage, and most of these considerations are related to efficiency. The more direct and parsimonious the delivery of instruction is, the more content can be covered. There are different ways that academic content can be taught; however, some instructional methods take more time, which has a negative impact on content coverage. For example, if the objective for a group of students is to learn how to write the letters of the alphabet, giving them dried lima beans, paper, and glue for the purpose of forming letters, while possibly fun, is less efficient and effective in meeting this objective than using explicit instruction procedures. Avoiding digressions, decreasing transition times, and increasing opportunities for students to learn by requiring frequent responses will also increase content coverage. 

The more time students participate in teacher-led, skill-level groups versus one-to-one teaching or seatwork activities, the more instruction they receive, and the more they learn. 

Students achieve more in classes in which they spend much of their time being directly taught by their teacher (Rosenshine & Stevens, 1986). Generally, group instruction has been found to be the most effective and efficient approach to teaching basic skills. Teacher-led group instruction most likely has this positive impact on achievement because it increases such effective teaching elements as clear explanations, modeling, practice, feedback, and frequent responding. 

The instruction, whether in general education or specialized settings, need not be delivered to the whole class; small-group instruction is often more effective. Brophy and Good (1986), in their analysis of instructional grouping in general education, concluded that breaking a larger class into smaller groups is necessary when the class is heterogeneous in terms of skill level (a common occurrence in today’s classrooms) and when students are beginning to learn academic skills. Breaking a large class into smaller groups allows for more practice and repetition, as well as for closer monitoring. Later research on students with special learning needs (Elbaum, Vaughn, Hughes, Moody, & Schumm, 2000) found that instruction in groups of 6–8 was generally more effective than smaller or larger groups or one-to-one instruction. For example, if a special education teacher spends 60 minutes on math instruction using a tutorial approach and has 12 students in her resource class, on average each student would receive 5 minutes of instruction. If the teacher is able to form two skill-level groups for instruction, each student will receive about 30 minutes of instruction. In addition, students who are taught in groups rather than tutored have more opportunity for peer interactions and more practice in academically related skills, such as turn taking, listening to others, and making contributions. 

Grouping for instruction is typically accomplished by putting students into groups based on their instructional needs and current functioning level. Although heterogeneous (mixed-functioning-level) groups have some advantages for certain instructional outcomes, grouping by academic skill level allows students to learn the skills most appropriate for them, thus increasing their success. This form of grouping should be used flexibly and should always be based on individual students’ needs, which may change over time. 

Providing support, structure, and guidance during instruction promotes academic success, and systematic fading of this support encourages students to become more independent learners. 

Scaffolding in an instructional context is analogous to the scaffolding used when constructing a building. A lot of scaffolding is used as construction begins, but as the building begins to take shape, the scaffolding is removed in stages until the building stands on its own. Also, the purpose of scaffolding in both construction and instruction is the same: to allow individuals to do a task that could not be done without using it at first. 

Through deliberate, careful, and temporary scaffolding, students can learn new basic skills as well as more complex skills (e.g., learning strategies, complex math operations, strategies for writing longer products), maintain a high level of success as they do so, and systematically move toward independent use of the skill. Scaffolding addresses several areas of learning difficulty exhibited by many students (especially those with disabilities), including attention problems, working memory deficits, and poorly organized knowledge (Swanson, 1999; Swanson & Siegel, 2001). The amount of initial support needed and the rate at which the support is withdrawn will vary, depending on students’ needs. When scaffolding, teachers typically provide high levels of initial guidance and then systematically reduce support as students respond with greater accuracy. As guidance is reduced, students are required to perform with increasing independence until they are able to perform the skill on their own. 

Scaffolding instruction can be applied by using several elements of explicit instruction:

1. Taking a complex skill (e.g., a multistep strategy) and teaching it in manageable and logical pieces or chunks.

2. Sequencing skills so that they build on each other.

3. Selecting examples and problems that progress in complexity. 

4. Providing demonstrations and completed models of problems. 

5. Providing hints and prompts as students begin to practice a new skill. 

6. Providing aids such as cue cards and checklists to help students remember the steps and processes used to complete tasks and solve problems.

In summary, scaffolding is an effective approach for ensuring success and building confidence for students while they learn, because it provides the needed support that helps bridge the gap between current abilities and the instructional goal (Rosenshine, 1997).

The ability to strategically use academic skills and knowledge often requires students to know different sorts of information at differing levels: the declarative level ("what" something is, factual information), the procedural level ("how" something is done or performed), and the conditional level ("when" and "where" to use the skill). 

Students often need to understand information at differing levels in order to use the information or knowledge strategically. Thus students should be provided instruction that targets different levels or forms of knowledge when appropriate. Although various taxonomies of knowledge exist (e.g., Bloom, 1956; Gagne, 1985; Kame’enui & Simmons, 1990), we focus on three forms of knowledge as categorized and described by Ellis and Worthington (1994). The first level is declarative knowledge, which can be characterized as factual-level knowledge, or what something is. Here are some examples of declarative knowledge forms:

• When asked to name a letter, can do so accurately

• When asked what sound a letter makes, can say the sound.

• When asked what 6 times 4 is, can say/write the correct product.

• When asked what the months of the year are, can say them in order.

• When asked to tell the parts of an essay, can respond with “Introduction, body, and conclusion.”

• When asked the meaning of concentrate, can accurately define it and provide examples of the word’s use.

Procedural knowledge relates to how something is done. It involves knowing how to perform skills or steps in a process or strategy, such as the steps in solving a long-division problem. Some additional examples of procedural knowledge forms include being able to do the following:

• Fill out a check.

• Solve two-digit multiplication problems.

• Determine the main idea of a paragraph.

• Write a persuasive essay.Determine the pronunciation of a multisyllabic word.

• Take well-organized notes on a lecture. 

Conditional knowledge refers to knowing when and when not to use a particular skill or strategy. Some examples of conditional knowledge include these: 

• Being able to decide when to use a question mark to end a sentence.

• Knowing when to borrow from the next column in a subtraction problem.

• Knowing which reading comprehension strategy to use, based on the genre (narrative vs. expository material).

• Writing a product that reflects the desired topic, audience, and purpose.

Our purpose for presenting and describing these forms of knowledge is to stress that you not only should teach what something is, but, whenever appropriate, should also teach how something is done and when to do it. When you convey all three forms of knowledge to your students, they are much more likely to become independent, self-regulated learners.