Student Engaged Time and Time on Task
Engaged time, a subset of allocated time, is the time that students appear to be paying attention to materials or presentations that have instructional goals. Although often used synonymously with the concept of time on task, Berliner (1990) distinguishes time on task as a subset—time a student is engaged in
T H E S K I L L F U L T E A C H E R86
PART TWO | MANAGEMENT | TIME
an appropriate learning task (for example, a student may be deeply engaged in mathematics work at a time that has been allocated for science). Early studies (Fisher et al., 1978) reported that, on average, students are engaged or attend- ing for only a portion of allocated time—about 75% of it. But the range of stu- dent engaged time was large—between 50% and 90%. Some studies (Stanley & Greenwood, 1983) have shown significant differences in academic engagement of high versus low socioeconomic status (SES) student groups. They write,
On a daily basis high SES students spent as much as 11 minutes (or 5 percent) more time per day engaged in writing, reading, and talking about academic matters than did their low SES counterparts. . . . At this daily rate, low SES students need to attend as much as one and a half months during summer vacation to obtain an equivalent amount of engaged time in one year. . . . Otherwise low SES students are at risk of academic delay. . . . because of their lower daily engagement rates. (p. 11)
While more recent reviews of the research can establish only a moderate cor- relation between engaged time on task and student achievement (Cotton, 1989), it is critical that we seize every opportunity to maximize engaged time for all students since it is the precursor to academic learning (high success) time. Re- cent studies of student engagement (Hunter & Csikszentmihalyi, 2003; Sher- noff, Csikszentmihalyi, Schneider, & Shernoff, 2003), in which large numbers of secondary students used wristwatch devices to record their activity and feel- ing states eight times daily, found that students spend a majority of class time in non-interactive activities such as listening to lectures and doing individual seatwork assignments. Interactive activities such as participating in discussions (9%) and group or lab work (6%) accounted for only a small percentage of the total time. Engagement, measured as a composite of interest, concentration, and enjoyment, was higher in group and individual work compared to lectures, ex- ams, or TV/video viewing. Students also reported being more engaged during “flow tasks”—those that students felt competent to complete and were high in challenge—compared to tasks that were low in challenge or that students felt were beyond their capabilities.