Participation in extracurricular activities and student achievement: evidence from German all-day schools

ABSTRACT

The present study investigates the effects of participation in academic extracurricular activities on student achievement in mathematics and reading in the course of secondary schooling. We use 2 samples of nonmandatory all-day schools that are part of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS): N = 1,131 fifth graders at 43 schools were followed until Grade 7 and N = 1,545 seventh graders at 64 schools until Grade 9. We compare students participating in all-day schools’ extracurricular activities homework support, remedial education, and subject-specific programs to nonparticipating students. After controlling for prior achievement and further student background variables as well as estimating school fixed effects, we find no effects of participation in extracurricular activities on student achievement for both samples and both outcomes. The study contributes to the evidence base on the effects of extracurricular activities. We discuss the findings in light of the international discourse on effective extracurricular activities.

KEYWORDS:

• All-day school
• extracurricular activities
• mathematics achievement
• reading achievement
• secondary schools

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Roisin Cronin for copy editing the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Starting Cohort Grade 5; doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC3:7.0.1. From 2008 to 2013, NEPS data were collected as part of the Framework Program for the Promotion of Empirical Educational Research funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). As of 2014, NEPS is carried out by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) at the University of Bamberg in cooperation with a nationwide network.

2. A further issue of regression adjustments relates to the linearity assumption. To address this issue, we applied nonparametric propensity score matching to adjust for confounding variables (Stuart, 2010). In the matching model, we included all above-mentioned student covariates and used 1:1 nearest-neighbor matching with replacement and calipers. Furthermore, we conducted exact matching on the school identification variable. The matching analyses lead to qualitatively the same results as the regression adjustments.

3. However, controlling for observed covariates also (at least partly) controls for unobserved covariates if they are correlated with the observed ones (Stuart, 2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Isa Steinmann

Isa Steinmann is a research fellow at the Center for Research on Education and School Development (IFS) in Dortmund. Her main research interests lie in the field of school development – especially the evaluation of all-day schooling in Germany – as well as international comparative research.

Rolf Strietholt

Rolf Strietholt is a researcher at the Center for Research on Education and School Development (IFS) in Dortmund. His main research interests comprise educational effectiveness research, heterogeneity, inequality and justice, international comparative research, and empirical social research.

Daniel Caro

Daniel Caro is a research fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment (OUCEA). His research interests include education inequality, international large-scale student assessments, R programming, mixed models in cross-sectional and longitudinal settings, and causal inference with observational data.