Our recent post on the long school days that some Chinese students put in got me wondering what kind of connection there might be between lots of classroom time and student performance on an international level. After all, Chinese students scored remarkably high on the latest PISA test.
Turns out there really isn’t an ironclad connection, as the graphic below shows. Certainly students in some countries with lots of instructional time perform well, but students in other top-ranking nations, like Finland, are able to post high scores with much less classroom time. And students in countries like the U.S. can put in lots of class time and still get average scores.
