Pacing

Description of the Strategy

Within an educational context, pacing typically refers to the rate at which information is presented to a learner. Pacing is often described as the speed of a teacher's oral delivery during instruction. Effective teachers vary their pace of instruction to increase or maintain students' attention. Teachers also pace their instructional delivery to increase the likelihood of correct student responses.

To provide briskly paced instruction, a teacher must be very familiar with the material being presented and know what needs to be articulated. When teachers speak to convey something important without frequent pauses to refer to their materials, students sustain their attention to instructional content. Lively instruction with no hesitations fosters greater student attention.

Research Basis

A large body of research on effective teaching indicates that pace of instruction is a fundamental instructional variable capable of influencing both academic performance and social behaviors. The relationship between pace of instruction and student performance is well documented. Researchers have demonstrated a relationship between brisk instructional pacing and higher levels of student accuracy. Rapid pacing is functionally related to higher levels of on-task behavior and decreases in problem behaviors.

Complications, Cautions, Guidelines

Teachers must consider several variables when determining an appropriate pace of instruction. The nature of the content being presented, students' familiarity with the content, opportunities for students to respond embedded within instruction, and the topography of expected student responses influence a teacher's instructional pace.

Monitoring students' opportunities to respond is one means of gauging an appropriate pace of instruction. Various rates of response opportunities are recommended in the literature. The optimum number of opportunities per minute of instruction will vary according to the age of the learners, their familiarity with the task, and the topography of the required response. For example, a lesson for younger students asked to decode words comprising three letters might be appropriately paced to allow the learners to generate 10 to 15 responses per minute. When determining an appropriate instructional pace, teachers must monitor student performance to ensure that they are attending and have adequate time to produce the desired responses.

Briskly paced instruction should not rush students into responding before they have adequate time to determine the correct answer. The key to effective pacing lies in a teacher's ability to prevent downtime immediately after student responses, while maintaining appropriate “think time” immediately prior to soliciting a response.