Time and Learning

Learning is one of the most valuable of all human activities, while time is the fundamental key to all learning activities. Increasing the amount of time available for learning and making it more productive are keys to improved learning. Both learning and time is central to the teachers responsibility to manage. Yet, American students have less learning time allocated to them than do students in other industrial countries. The idea of time and learning describes scheduled time as the umbrella component from which the allotted instructional time and learning time are achieved. Scheduled time, therefore, must be maximized so that ultimately high amounts of instructional and learning time can be obtained. For these reasons, educators must think carefully about how allocated time is used and distributed throughout the parameters of a school year when using Common Core assessment strategies. Before constructing a performance assessment, the designer must decide on the time length for the performance based assignment, which could range from one class period to a week, or even a month for assessments that require extensive research.

This leads us to the next level of complexity, when utilizing meta-cognitive principles are associated with common core performance based assessments then allocated time will certainly need to be considered. In other words performance base assessments may take larger blocks of time that are not traditionally built into a school scheduled day. In this case two important action decisions would need to be considered as we look at time allocations and performance based assessment. The first is to give larger blocks of time to individual teachers allowing for performance assessments to occur within a school day or to quantify time outside of the classroom for additional learning time to be allocated to the student.  In any case performance based assessment will increase the amount of learning time normally associated to a traditional school year.