The influence of weekly instruction on student’s academic performance in Spain

Abstract

Students attend compulsory school lessons every week, and this time should be used in such a way that it improves students’ competences; otherwise, it may be wasted. However, although parents suppose that their children are always learning in these lessons, this might not be the case in Spain. In order to analyse whether the weekly instruction time received by Spanish students is useful for their learning or not, data from PISA 2018 for 15 year-old students have been employed. In addition, we intend to go beyond correlation by the use of student fixed-effects within-student between-subjects. With this approach, those variables which are fixed within-students might be controlled. Our results indicate that weekly instruction time does not seem to influence students’ academic performance. Many robustness checks, which split the sample according to several conditional variables, have supported these results. Building on these results, we suggest the rearrangement of students’ weekly instruction time and its efficient use in the new Spanish education law.