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Our recent post on the long schools days that some Chinese students put in got me wondering what kind of connection there might be between lots of classroom time and student performance on an international level. After all, the Chinese scored remarkably high in the latest PISA test scores.

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Turns out there really isn’t an ironclad connection, as the graphic below shows. Certainly some countries with lots of instructional time perform well, but other top-ranking nations, like Finland, are able to post high scores with much less classroom time. And countries like the US can put in lots of class time and still get average scores.

instruction time — Class time and test scores

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More time in the classroom doesn’t always mean better scores

by Davin McHenry, The Hechinger Report
May 20, 2011

<h1>More time in the classroom doesn’t always mean better scores</h1>
<p class="byline">by Davin McHenry, The Hechinger Report <br />May 20, 2011</p>

<p><a href="http://hechingered.org/content/a-day-in-the-life-of-chinese-students_3826/">Our recent post</a> on the long schools days that some Chinese students put in got me wondering what kind of connection there might be between lots of classroom time and student performance on an international level. After all, the Chinese scored remarkably high in the <a href="http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/2011004.pdf">latest PISA test scores</a>.</p>
<p>Turns out there really isn’t an ironclad connection, as the graphic below shows. Certainly some countries with lots of instructional time perform well, but other top-ranking nations, like Finland, are able to post high scores with much less classroom time. And countries like the US can put in lots of class time and still get average scores.</p>
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