Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Economics of Education Review journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/econedurev Class meeting frequency, start times, and academic performance Chad Cotti a , John Gordanier b , Orgul Ozturk b, * a University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, 800 Algoma Blvd. Oshkosh, WI 54901 b University of South Carolina, 1014 Greene street, Columbia, SC 29208, United States ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Grades Scheduling Academic performance JEL classification: I20 I21 I23 ABSTRACT This paper examines the relationship between the start time and meeting frequency of college courses and the academic performance of students. Using administrative data from a large public university, we account for both student and instructor fixed effects. Consistent with a large literature, we find a positive time of day effect. That is, students earn higher grades in classes that start later. However, contrary to previous literature, we find students earn higher grades in classes with fewer meeting times when not accounting for instructor fixed effects. This effect is entirely explained by instructor sorting on course schedules. Instructors that assign higher grades, either due to quality of instruction or grade leniency, are more likely to meet twice a week rather than three times a week. Including instructor fixed effects, we find no difference in two-day a week classes and three-day a week classes. However, grades are lower in classes that meet just once a week. Would you rather have the pizza sliced into three pieces or two? Three, I am really hungry today. 1. Introduction Increasingly, decision makers are recognizing that both the start times of classes and the frequency of their delivery can potentially af- fect student performance. This has led to many high schools starting later and deviating from the traditional 50 min periods to block sche- duling, where classes meet less frequently, but with longer classes per meeting. One motivation is to better align class times with the students’ circadian rhythm (Cardinali, 2008). The hope being that later start times would lead to fewer sleep deprived students and better perfor- mance in class. A substantial literature exists on the relationship between sleep, start times, and academic performance. Not surprisingly, the amount of sleep adolescents get is positively associated with academic perfor- mance (Sabia, Wang, and Cesur, 2017; Eide and Showalter, 2012). Additional work has linked later start times of schools to better aca- demic performance for students in middle school (Edwards, 2012), high-school (Hinrichs, 2011; Pope, 2016) and college (Carrell, Maghakian, and West, 2011; Diette and Raghav, 2017a,b). A number of papers have measured the effect of the adoption of block scheduling in high-schools, with mixed results (Rice, Croninger, and Roellke, 2002; Hughes, 2004). There is also some work on the organizational structure of schools (Eren and Millimet, 2007) and the length of the school week (Anderson and Walker, 2015). Less studied is the effect of course meeting frequency, especially among colleges. At colleges, the most common course meeting frequencies and times are twice a week for 75 min or three days a week for 50 min. Generally, courses that meet once a week meet for 2.5 h. Conceptually, meeting more frequently might allow for students to have greater time in be- tween concepts in which to more deeply absorb the ideas. This “spacing effect” might be offset by a competing transactions cost if each time the course meets a certain amount of time is required to refresh the student on the material being studied and reinforce connections between con- cepts. Competing pressures, unrelated to the optimal format for learning, also determine whether courses are scheduled to meet in a one-day a week, two-day a week, or three-day a week format. First, administrators face space constraints that make three-day a week schedules more at- tractive. By dividing the day into more, but shorter blocks, more classes can be scheduled with the three-day a week format (Reed, 2015). Second, colleges face political pressure to not have underutilized space nor give the appearance of faculty and staff not working on Fridays. Finally, colleges may wish to have students in classes on Friday mornings to reduce student drinking on “Thirst-day” nights (Hafner, 2006). Of course, Friday classes might fail to reduce student drinking and instead just lead to more absences on Fridays. Conversely, there are also pressures to reduce the number of Friday classes. Colleges may be able to save money on energy and other sup- port costs when they have fewer Friday classes (David, 2008). Further, typically both students and professors wish to “stack” their schedules, in order to give themselves more days without classes (Reardon, et. al. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2017.10.010 Received 2 August 2017; Received in revised form 23 October 2017; Accepted 24 October 2017 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: cottic@uwosh.edu (C. Cotti), jgordanier@moore.sc.edu (J. Gordanier), odozturk@moore.sc.edu (O. Ozturk). Economics of Education Review 62 (2018) 12–15 Available online 01 November 2017 0272-7757/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. MARK