There’s a really interesting study of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which looked at grades and also performance on standardized tests in math for elementary school students. And what it found was that students who had math in the morning had higher grades and better scores than students who had math in the afternoon.
Now that’s pretty amazing because when we think about scheduling, we think of it as purely an administrative task. We don’t think about it as a pedagogical task. We focus a lot, understandably, on what’s the curriculum we’re going to use? We focus a lot on who’s going to be teaching, and are we giving that teacher the proper professional development?
But just the random assignment of kids in an afternoon math class, versus a morning math class, is going to affect how much math that kid learns. And that could have a few degrees of tilt in the trajectory of that kid’s education life going forward.
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Each Tuesday is EducationTuesday here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts about educators and all things STEM. Adafruit supports our educators and loves to spread the good word about educational STEM innovations!