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John Gugerty & Brian Bottge

January 2004

Block scheduling can take a number of different forms but generally results in fewer but longer classes than traditional schedules permit. Proponents of block schedules have cited several advantages for students, such as more uninterrupted class time and fewer classes in one semester. Advantages for teachers parallel those for students and include longer periods of instructional time, fewer classes to prepare for, and fewer students to teach in one day.

Despite the popularity of block scheduling, research findings are mixed and show no clear advantage of one schedule over the other. The inconsistency of these results leaves school administrators with no clear direction about whether they should stay with traditional schedules or risk changing to one of the block schedule variations.

UW-Madison education professor Brian Bottge and colleagues John Gugerty, Ron Serlin, and Kyoung-Suk Moon recently compared the effects of traditional and 4x4 block schedules on the academic achievement of students with and without disabilities from a random selection of high schools. They found that partitioning the school day into shorter 60-minute periods or longer 90-minute periods did not seem to result in different academic achievement by the two group of students.

Reasons for block scheduling

The 1997 reauthorization of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act required that students with disabilities be given opportunities to learn challenging curricula alongside their peers without disabilities. This change in the law has generated new and intense research efforts to find strategies for supporting and enhancing the learning of students with disabilities in the general education classroom.

One way school leaders have responded to these pressures is by redistributing the school day into longer and more flexible blocks of time. For example, block schedules have been recommended to give more time to engage students in activity-based learning opportunities. These changes, some predicted, would eventually result in higher expectations, substantial curricular changes, and improved learning experiences.

As noted, these expectations have not been met. However, Bottge does not find the new research findings surprising. His research showed that teachers on block schedules did not in fact use alternative instructional strategies; rather, teachers assigned to each type of schedule used similar instructional strategies. Moreover, teachers on both schedules

• were satisfied with their jobs and their school schedules;
• spent about the same amount of time on various instructional activities;
• expressed similar confidence in their ability to meet the needs of students with disabilities; and
• reported similar levels of collaboration between general and special education teachers (although teachers on block schedules valued collaboration more than teachers on traditional schedules).

Reasons other than academic achievement may justify school leaders' decisions to change from traditional to block schedules. However, if changing to block schedules does not meet the reform and legislative objectives of achieving higher academic performance, the time and money used to make the change may be better used, for example, to develop and train teachers on implementing more effective instructional methods. Of course, professional development may also be the key to making good use of block scheduling.

It can be argued that student and teacher satisfaction with longer class periods and fewer classes may be adequate reasons to make the switch to block scheduling. Ultimately, however, student achievement may depend less on how the school day is partitioned than on what teachers and students accomplish in the classroom.

For more information, contact John Gugerty at the Center on Education and Work, jgugerty@education.wisc.edu, or go to the project's web site at http://www.cew.wisc.edu/block/

Some material in this article originally appeared in NASSP Bulletin, vol. 87, no. 636 (September 2003), pp. 2--14.

This research project, H324C990018, was funded at 100% by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, Field Initiated Research Projects, from July 1, 1999 - June 30, 2003 for a total of $531,121. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and the reader should not assume endorsement by the Federal government.