What's the Role of the Amount of Reading Instruction?

Tim Shanahan

Blast from the Past: This entry first appeared on March 11, 2023, and is being reissued on July 25, 2026. The reason for bringing it back is due to the significant loss of instruction that has occurred since the COVID-19 pandemic. Chronic absenteeism rates have soared, and many kids aren’t even coming to school (Barragan Torres, 2025; U. S. Department of Education, 2025). These days, schools are often struggling with teacher absences too (Hansen, Aggarwal, & Wagner, 2025). This blog explains why the amount of reading instruction is so important and  provides  practical advice onhow to make every minute count in the classroom. A link is provided to the comments made on the original posting.

John Carroll (1963/1989) proposed an innovative model of academic learning. According to Carroll, learning was a function of five variables: student aptitude, opportunity to learn, perseverance, quality of teaching, and ability to understand.

It wasn’t the list of variables that was so provocative, but how Carroll defined each.  

He operationalized all those in terms of instructional time.

For instance, aptitude – then usually a score on an IQ test – was, for Carroll, a matter of how much time was needed to learn something. A young Einstein may be able to master a K-12 physics curriculum in 42 minutes, while it might take Tim Shanahan 42 years!

Opportunity referred to the amount of instructional time schools provided. If teachers devoted 100 hours to physics instruction, Einstein would have it made, given his aptitude, while I might be better advised to become a reading teacher.

Even if schools allotted 42 years to physics, I still might not make it. What are the chances I’d sit still for all those laws of motion, electrons, and quarks? Perseverance, the time students are willing to be taught, figures in learning as well.

Even quality is a matter of time in Carroll’s scheme. If the quality of teaching is low, then kids will need relatively more teaching to be successful.

No one has come up with ingenious ways to measure those time-based variables. However, the point it made about instructional time was invaluable.  

In the 1970s -1980s, researchers following Carroll’s lead explored time and its relationship to academic achievement, including in reading (e.g., Fisher, Berliner, Filby, Marliabe, Cahen, & Dishaw, 1981). As a result, educational scientists now have a different conception of instructional time and how it should be thought about.

Studies continue to demonstrate the power of the amount of instruction in determining student learning (Gay, Sonnenschein, Sun, & Baker, 2021; Sonnenschein, Stapleton, & Benson, 2010; Walberg, Fraser, & Welch, 1986).

Given the amount of evidence, I believe that reading educators don’t think enough about the importance of the amount teaching.

Here are 7 key ideas about instructional time that every reading educator should know.

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