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European Journal of Education Studies ISSN: 2501 - 1111 ISSN-L: 2501 - 1111 Available on-line at: www.oapub.org/edu Volume 3 │ Issue 7 │ 2017 doi: 10.5281/zenodo.832883 TIME-ON-TASK IN PRIMARY CLASSROOMS, DURING DIFFERENT TEACHING-LEARNING APPROACHES Sachin Mohite1i Meenal Dashputre2 Research Analyst, Monitoring and Evaluation 1 Shantilal Muttha Foundation, Pune, India Head - Research, Monitoring and Evaluation, 2 Shantilal Muttha Foundation, Pune, India Abstract: The entire education system is moving from the teacher-centered teaching-learning approaches towards student-centered teaching-learning approaches, with anticipation that it would increase the learning outcomes. This empirical study was carried out to compare the traditional and non-traditional classrooms. It also tried to understand the effectiveness of the Alternate Instructions in the Mathematics and Primary Language (Marathi) classrooms. This study collected about 8000 snapshots from the classrooms of Government schools. Based on the empirical evidences, study can claim that NonTraditional classrooms show more Time-on-Task (ToT) as compared to the Traditional classrooms. Study could show interesting trends of ToT throughout a session of 35mins. It also compared those trends for Mathematics and Marathi. Keywords: time-on-task (ToT), teaching-learning approaches, alternative instructional strategies 1. Introduction There are a lot of efforts taken to improve the learning outcomes of children. Few of them are very focused on the pedagogy. Various innovative Instructional Methods (IM) are being deployed by the teachers. Again, wide scale policy-level changes are also being made to incorporate child-centered approaches into education; but it is still Copyright © The Author(s). All Rights Reserved. © 2015 – 2017 Open Access Publishing Group 596 Sachin Mohite, Meenal Dashputre TIME-ON-TASK IN PRIMARY CLASSROOMS, DURING DIFFERENT TEACHING-LEARNING APPROACHES questioned whether it is really helping in achieving the expected learning outcome. There is paucity of the empirical research to respond to the comments of these skeptics. There are few challenges and hurdles resulting in the lack of widespread studies on these lines. One of the important challenges is the lack of measurement techniques. Second important challenge is the alignment of these Alternative Instructional methods towards the learning outcomes. Lastly, an unending list of the Instructional Methods and a variation of using those in the classrooms. There are few studies comparing active vs passive teaching (Cui, January 2013) but that is not done for the primary classrooms. This study tried to address these challenges during this study. Snapshot tools were designed based on the tools developed by Walkup and colleagues (2009), to understand the children in the classroom settings. Tools were flexible so as to accommodate the dynamic Non-Traditional (NT) classrooms. Study articulated operational definitions for classroom instructions to align with the Expected Learning Outcome (ELO). Another important contribution during the study was to move the thought process from the Instructional Methods (IM) to Instructional Strategies (IS). For downloading the full article, please access the following link: http://oapub.org/edu/index.php/ejes/article/view/901 European Journal of Education Studies - Volume 3 │ Issue 7 │ 2017 597