Long-run effects of lengthening the school day on students’academic achievement : a longitudinal study of full day school reform in Chile"

Abstract

This paper studies the effects of a large and gradual increase in the Chilean school day over students ’academic achievement. I exploit a gradual and exogenous variation produced by the reform with ani nnovative measure of exposure to longer school day treatment. Using longitudinal data at individual level and a fixed-effect strategy,I find no relevant effect of the reformon the students’ standardized test scores in the long rung Also,this paper found heterogeneous response to additional instructional time by gender, type of school and geographic zone. Finally, these results are robust to the inclusion of several covariates and insensible to the cohort election.