Student Participation in Extended Day Programming at the UCCS Donoghue Campus During the 2009-2010 School Year

This report focuses on describing and documenting the participation of students in the Extended Day Program at the Donoghue Elementary School, a University of Chicago Charter School. At Donoghue, extending student learning involves not only adding minutes to the school day, but also reorganizing the daily schedule for both students and adults who support student learning. To account for the variety of experiences available to students as a result of this creative extended learning model, the research team created a measure called the Intensity of Teacher Minutes (ITM), a calculation that incorporates both time spent at school and the teacher-student ratio during that time. This report uses ITMs to document the degree to which students receive extended or enhanced programming, as well as the relationship between extended learning time and student reading performance. We found that students in fifth grade had the highest average ITMs, followed by fourth graders and third graders, likely due to the increasing amount of available programming to older students. In addition, we show that the majority of students who received the highest amounts of ITMs were also those students who were reading below grade level at the beginning of the school year.