The concept of block scheduling is commonly implemented in secondary schools across the country. The school got on the bandwagon by applying what can be called “accelerated block scheduling” to our daily routines, where classes meet for 85 minutes every day of the week during a semester to cover a full-year course in just half a year. This system of scheduling is said to have some positive aspects, like creating a decrease in absences, having the ability to make school less stressful, and improving student-teacher relationships, but these are not the most critical issues. The matter at hand is what block scheduling does for actual learning.
Overall, there is a slight difference in the amount of time spent during class in a block schedule as opposed to a traditional schedule, but there the fundamental problem is adolescent attention span. Providing a class that is twice as long does not necessarily enable twice as much material to be covered. It is unreasonable to assume that all students can focus for 85 minutes straight. This is especially true for learning disabled students, or even students who aren’t keen on a certain subject. With block scheduling, it becomes necessary to face the realities of public school: not all students are hungry for knowledge, and not all students can be ambitious enough to retain everything they learn during a single 85-minute period.
In the April 1991 issue of “Educational Leadership”, the author Frank Emptier emphasizes that, "With total study time equated, two or more opportunities to study the same material are much more effective than a single opportunity." Emptier’s studies and pedagogical beliefs assert that students learn most effectively when they are exposed to concepts in small, easily understandable pieces called increments, and when new concepts and skills are reviewed continuously.
Dr. David J. Bateson of the University of British Columbia conducted a study that suggests retention as another dilemma with block scheduling. He studied 30,000 tenth grade students in British Columbia who took science courses in either year-long or semester-long periods. At the end of the year, each student took a test on the material they learned, and test scores of students in year-long courses drastically surpassed those of students in semester-long courses. Bateson’s study implied that first semester students had forgotten a significant amount of class material by the time they took the test at the end of the year. Retention results in forgotten material, which can prove to be problematic when it comes to important exams like ACT, AP tests, or SAT.
If, by some chance, block scheduling actually promoted greater depth of understanding despite a reduced amount of coverage, we might expect to see mastery of standardized tests or positive appraisal in scientific studies, but this is not the case. With the amount of time spent learning that has been lost as a result of block scheduling, it has never been more evident that less is not really more.