Engaged time
Lovitt's Lines: What musings did the superb special educator offer about engaged time in SET for September 1984?
Editor’s note: We published a regular column by the late Tom Lovitt in the original print version of Special Education Today. We called it “Lovitt’s Lines,” and this is the content published on page 11 of the September 1984 issue of Special Education Today, 1(5)—JohnL
In the past few years researchers have informed us that if you want to teach something to someone you should first schedule some time to teach it. They refer to this as allocated time. Other investigators have proclaimed that the amount of time individuals actually respond to questions or write answers during the allocated time is even more important to their learning. Increased responding means increased learning. This they call engaged time. These researchers have also found a reasonable relationship between achievement and time spent on a task.
Pretty hot stuff, eh? According to those scientists, teachers must first schedule time to teach something, then see to it that their pupils practice on that skill.
Allocating Time
But what to do with this information beyond the obvious—allocate time to designated skills and see to it that pupils are engaged in those activities—is not clear. One important next step is to determine just how much time is required for certain individuals to learn various tasks. It would be extremely helpful to know how much time was required to teach a severely retarded boy to learn a bus routine, to instruct a hearing-impaired girl to sign, or to teach a learning-disabled youngster to read. Such information would be invaluable when designing complete schedules for pupils. As it is now, we take our best shot by allocating 20 minutes for this, 30 for that, 45 for something else, and so forth. What may be happening with this scheduling-by-hunch approach is that some skills are not developed to useful levels because they weren't given enough time, and perhaps others could have been acquired in less time than was allowed.
Engaged Time Not Enough
In searching through some data Cherie Hansen and I collected 10 years ago, I was able to extract some revealing facts on this relationship between engaged time and reading achievement. In a class of seven LD boys, 30 minutes of individualized instruction was scheduled each day for 142 days over a nine month period.
That was a total of 71 hours of engaged time. As for achievement, these students gained an average of two grade levels (ranging from 1.5 to 2.5). Furthermore, their correct oral reading rates nearly doubled and their incorrect rates improved even more from pretest to posttest.
There are more factors than engaged time to take into account when predicting achievement—type of pupil, form of instruction, and others—but studies that inform us now about minimum times required to obtain certain gains would certainly be welcomed. The teacher of LD pupils, for example, would have a reasonable idea about how much time to devote to different areas in order to increase the probability that his or her students would be proficient in those areas. Not only would the teacher know how much time to allocate each day, but also how many days throughout a period should be set aside for instruction in the different subjects (which brings me to the topic of next issue's report—the controversy about an extended school year).
Tom Lovitt was a Professor at the University of Washington.
This is fascinating! Time is limited and precious. If I knew about how long it would take my child to learn to multiply, write legibly, etc. I could better schedule time.