Search

This study looks at the causal impact of the school day schedule on student achievement. How a student's classes are scheduled throughout the day is often determined by necessity, but can have a meaningful impact on academic performance. Acknowledging students' internal clocks and making small changes to scheduling patters could be a relatively low-cost method for administrators to improve performance. This paper builds on literature that has shown the negative effects of early morning classes to consider the influence the school-day schedule has throughout the day. The data is from five cohorts of college freshman at the United States Air Force Academy who face randomized scheduling and largely take a common set of classes. The authors that the largest impact of the schedule is in the early morning, but also find evidence of academic fatigue and asymmetric effects among STEM, non-STEM, and physical education courses that vary over the day. Contrary findings in the literature are reconciled by showing that, all else equal, the afternoon is the best time of day for learning, but academic fatigue wears on students as the school day progresses. Tables and figures are appended.