When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

by Daniel H. Pink

Unfortunately, Danish schools, like many around the world, offer only two breaks each day. Worse, legions of school systems are cutting back on recess and other restorative pauses for students in the name of rigor and—get ready for the irony—higher test scores. But as Harvard’s Francesca Gino, one of the study’s authors, puts it, “If there were a break after every hour, test scores would actually improve over the course of the day.”13 Many younger students underperform during the trough, which risks both providing teachers with an inaccurate sense of their progress and prompting administrators to attribute to what and how students are learning something that is really an issue of when they’re taking a test. “We believe these results to have two important policy implications,” say the researchers who studied the Danish experience.