Expanding School Resources and Increasing Time on Task: Effects on Students’ Academic and Noncognitive Outcomes

This paper uses a natural experiment in Israel to assess the impact of school teaching resources and how it is used, “time-on-task”, on academic achievements and noncognitive outcomes. It exploits variation induced by a change in the funding formula that reduced instructional resources funding for some schools and increased them for others. The results suggest that increased school resources and students’ spending more time at school and on key tasks all lead to increased academic achievements with no behavioral costs. Separate estimations of the effect of increasing subject-specific instructional time per week also show positive and significant effects on math, science, and English test scores and small and nonsignificant effects on Hebrew test scores. However, there are no cross effects of additional instructional time across subjects. This evidence is robust to using different identification strategies. The evidence also shows that a longer school week increases the time that students spend on homework without reducing social and school satisfaction and without increasing school violence.