The Council of the European Union has set the goal of reducing low achievement in reading, mathematics and science among 15-year-olds to less than 15 % by 2020. How are European countries going to achieve this? One of the key elements in the learning process is the instruction time available to students. In fact, not only the quality of…

This report examines the recommended minimum instruction time in full-time compulsory general education in 2016/17 in 42 European education systems. It includes national diagrams illustrating the data by country and by subject. The comparative overview examines the policy changes that have taken place over the last year regarding the recommended…

Reading, writing and literature, mathematics, natural sciences and foreign languages are recognised as core subjects in all European countries. But how much time do students spend on those subjects at school, and how much does this instruction time vary across countries? This report provides information about the recommended minimum instruction…

Since 2010, annually updated data on instruction time has been available on the Eurydice website. Given the great similarities between the two data collections, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Eurydice networks have decided to produce one single data collection tool and conjointly manage the data collection on…

Transforming Writing was a two-year action research project, sponsored by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, which developed a model for the teaching and learning of writing that embedded formative assessment. This report evaluates to what extent the model of writing developed by the teachers during the research period impacted on children's writing…

This study of 32 public secondary school English teachers in the state of Alabama and of 477 students in these teachers' participating classes, employed teacher and student surveys and early- and late-in-course samples of timed narrative and persuasive writing. As predicted, NWP teachers wrote more extensively than comparison teachers, and the…

The 6+1 Trait[R] Writing model (Culham 2003) emphasizes writing instruction in which teachers and students analyze writing using a set of characteristics, or "traits," of written work: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation. The Ideas trait includes the main content and message, including…

This study examined student writing over the past decades. The National Study of Writing Instruction addressed questions through analyses of existing data sets, particularly those from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which include background questions on instructional practices in U.S. middle and high schools. NAEP…