Panel Paper: The Causal Effect of the School Day Schedule on Adolescents' Academic Achievement

Saturday, November 8, 2014 : 10:15 AM
Galisteo (Convention Center)

*Names in bold indicate Presenter

Teny M. Shapiro, Santa Clara University and Kevin Williams, University of California, Davis
How a student's classes are scheduled throughout the day is often determined by necessity, but can have a meaningful impact on academic performance.  Acknowledging students' internal clocks and making small changes to scheduling patters could be a relatively low-cost method for administrators to improve performance. This paper builds on literature that has shown the negative effects of early morning classes to consider the influence the school-day schedule has throughout the day.  Our data is five cohorts of college freshman at the United States Air Force Academy who face randomized scheduling and largely take a common set of classes.  We find the largest impact of the schedule is in the early morning, but also find evidence of academic fatigue and asymmetric effects among STEM, non-STEM, and physical education courses that vary over the day.

Full Paper: