Italy has an achievement gap—one that may sound familiar to Americans. PISA scores show a marked gap between Italian students and those of other OECD countries in both math and reading. Digging into the data, Italian education officials found their own in-country gap: Students in the wealthier north perform far better than students in the poorer south. As a result of all of this, starting in 2010, schools in Southern Italy were offered an opportunity to participate in an extended learning time program known as The Quality and Merit Project (abbreviated PQM in Italian). A new study published in the journal Economics of Education Review looks at PQM’s math and reading intervention, which consisted of additional teaching time after school in four of the poorest—and lowest-performing—regions in the country.
A couple of things to note: PQM intervention was focused not on improving PISA test scores, but on improving scores on the typical tests taken by students in lower secondary school (equivalent to grades six to eight in the U.S.). There is no enumeration of which/when/how many tests these students typically take and the researchers are not attempting to make a connection between the intervention and PISA test scores. We as readers should not either. The poor performance of Italian students on PISA simply shone a light on poor performance elsewhere, and perhaps more importantly, unlocked the funding (from the European Union’s Regional Development Fund) that paid teachers to implement an intervention aimed at closing the detected gap.[1] Deciding to initiate the PQM intervention was voluntary on the part of schools. That allowed researchers to match schools that participated with similar schools that didn’t participate. Using results from the typical tests taken by lower secondary school students, the analysts compared changes in test scores before and after the intervention.
The report had two key findings. First, PQM had a positive effect on average test scores in math, but no impact on reading scores. Second, the impact differed depending on pre-intervention achievement: students in the lowest-achieving schools—in the bottom third—made significant gains on math due to the program. For students attending schools in the top two-thirds of achievement, the impact of the after-school program was null in both math and language. According to this evaluation, then, the program worked in a narrow sense—in just math and for the lowest-achieving students.
Researchers conclude that additional in-class instruction time as an intervention in reading is not particularly helpful to students in grades six through eight. “This result is consistent with other studies in the literature showing that it is much harder to intervene on reading and comprehension skills,” they write, “rather than on skills involving practice, like maths, because a large part of literacy work takes place through general vocabulary training in the home environment.” In other words, improving the “skill” of reading is much more than a matter of spending more time on it once fluent decoding has been learned. (We would add that it also relates to content knowledge—something that certainly can and should be taught in school.) However, this research indicates that quantitative reasoning and mathematical knowledge—increased by repetition and “skill building”—responds positively through more time spent on task, especially for low-achieving students.
We need to be careful about the conclusions we draw based on the numerous caveats and unknowns here (not to mention the differing culture and language), but a detailed look at the benefit to students of additional time on task is no bad thing. A longer school day is often seen as a cure-all for students with poor test scores and is sometimes the raison d'être of certain school types. Perhaps a more targeted approach to additional seat time the proper approach.
SOURCE: Erich Battistina and Elena Claudia Meroni, “Should we increase instruction time in low achieving schools? Evidence from Southern Italy,” Economics of Education Review (December, 2016).
[1] As befits this particular journal, the economics of the PQM intervention is addressed in the report. There is not enough space to summarize it here, but it could be instructive to American policymakers about ways to use data to improve outcomes.
