| Abstract: | The authors use a microeconomic theory of schools and highly detailed panel data on time allocations to examine student learning curves for reading and mathematics. In addition to examining the factors that affect student achievement, they investigate the role teachers' values play in allocating scarce learning time to students, and the subsequent effects on the distribution of learning across those students. They test hypotheses about the productivity of teachers in teaching mathematics and reading, whether marginal products vary across a sample of teachers, and whether the marginal products of time in alternate types of classroom organization significantly differ. The authors' findings are consistent with the view that more time on a subject does increase learning, but suggest that the size of the effects is small and subject to diminishing returns. With respect to teacher preferences, the results show that teachers in the sample overwhelmingly employed compensating strategies in allocating resources to the students. Teachers tend to prefer narrower distributions of learning across students than wider ones. |
