Grounding Equity Reform: Matching Learning Time Reforms to Theories of Learning and Change

• In Event: 61.036 - Exploring Learning Time as a Core Resource for Educational Equity and Achievement

Abstract

Learning Time Reforms (LTRs) have become a popular way to attempt to boost student learning, particularly in schools that are underperforming on high-stakes tests. These reforms take a number of forms, including adding time to the day or year, reorganizing how existing time is used, and adding “enrichment opportunities” by leveraging community resources and augmenting after-school programing. While the range of implementation priorities is mirrored by variations on the LTR theme, this Colorado-based research group approached the reform area through its partnership with the More and Better Learning Time (MBLT) Initiative. The Ford Foundation asked our research team to, among other things, identify potential causal relationships between MBLT and improved student learning and development -- the findings of which drive the present critical literature review paper.

To attend to this task, we collected and reviewed over seventy LTR publications from the past decade. Using a snowball sampling method that began with a comprehensive search of three databases (e.g., ERIC, Google scholar, and Google), we reviewed the literature for its main claims around the advancement of student learning and development. Our foundational finding is that, the LTR literature offers no clear guidance for policy or practice, largely because of the diversity in its breadth, depth, and scope. Yet despite these limitations, we find value in analyzing and situating the literature in what we do know about best practices in education reform. As an interdisciplinary team of learning scientists and educational policy researchers, we operate under the guiding assumptions that MBLT reforms, like other equity-oriented reforms, will succeed only when grounded in a robust theory of learning and a theory of change that accounts for the special nature of such reforms.

Accordingly, as we read and iteratively coded the articles, we asked ourselves the following two questions: 1) To what extent does each piece provide a definition of learning, and towards what ends? and 2) Are the LTR reform strategies and goals in the piece grounded in a larger understanding of the political or normative climate of the environment in which the reform is enacted?

Overall, we found the literature to lack a rigorous theory of learning in which learning was seen as a relational, social process, constituted not only within the confines of formal school setting but occurring in everyday practices and across settings and contexts (Gutierrez, forthcoming). The literature also lacked a theory of change in which the normative and political context of the reform was explicitly taken into account (Oakes, 1992). These theoretical footings, which allow us to leverage what is known about how people learn best and how equitable change can be enacted with fidelity to core goals and values, offer room for growth in the emerging literature on LTRs. This, in turn, offers pathways for developing LTRs in ways that advance students’ learning and development.

Authors

• Daniela Kruel DiGiacomo, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Hannah Jones, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Joshua Jared Prudhomme, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Ben R. Kirshner, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Kevin G. Welner, University of Colorado Boulder