Johannes W. Luyten

Time in Internationally Comparative Studies

In this chapter, illustrative internationally comparative data about time at school, time spent in out-of-school programs, and homework/ individual study time are presented. In the first section this is done in a more descriptive way, while in the second and third sections, the association between the various indicators of instruction time and student performance, between and within countries, are discussed. The overall conclusion was that the results from international comparative studies concerning the association of time with educational achievement should be interpreted with a lot of caution. Negative associations of facets of time and student achievement at country level could mean that the causal direction is reversed, in the sense that more investment in time happens as a reaction to low performance rather than as a cause of higher performance. The finding that negative associations persisted in the secondary analyses of the PISA 2009 data-set, when change in time investment was related to change in performance between countries indicates that this phenomenon is not just an artifact of cross-sectional research design, but a matter of reactive policy (more time investment when achievement results are low), which compensates insufficiently for more important sources of low achievement, such as low SES composition.