Organized civic and non-civic activities as predictors of academic GPA in high school students

Abstract

Unlike organized activities such as sports and arts, civic activities in adolescence (e.g., volunteering, student government) have been less studied in relation to school success and almost all existing evidence consists of cross-sectional findings. In a longitudinal study, 1035 pupils (64% females, 20% nonwhite, M_age = 14.21 years) from high schools reported their engagement in organized non-civic and civic activities during the school year, dimensions of activity participation (e.g., intensity, duration, motives), and covariables (age, gender, ethnicity, SES, self-esteem, parental relationship, school motivation). Previous and end-of-year grade point average (GPA) were collected from school administrations. Results revealed that both civic and non-civic organized activities independently predicted increases in GPA over the school year, even after adjusting for all covariables.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Francis Paré from Alliance pour l’engagement jeunesse for his close collaboration on this research project and our community partners, Amnesty International Canada francophone section, Oxfam-Quebec, Monique-Fitz-Back Foundation, and Mouvement ACTES (Centrale des Syndicats du Québec).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Consent to participate

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study and from their parents/tutors.

Ethics approval

This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the Ethics Committee of the University of Quebec at Montreal.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 In the present research, we also included a six-item measure of the level of community availability or opportunities for civic activity participation (e.g., “My school or my community does not offer civic activities”). However, since we were not interested in the factors that contribute to civic participation in the present research, but in the effect of civic activity participation on school success, we did not use this measure. To be sure, controlling for this measure in all analyses did not affect the results.

2 Preliminary analyses on the questionnaire responses revealed that youths of parents who did not grant us access to their grades or that their grades could not be obtained from the school were less likely to participate in civic (16% vs. 20%, F[1, 1630] = 3.45, p = .06, η² = .002) and non-civic activities (48% vs. 57%, F[1, 1630] = 12.62, p < .001, η² = .008) and were from lower SES backgrounds (M = .04, SD = .93 vs. M = -.10, SD = .90, F[1, 1630] = 8.00, p = .005, η² = .005) than youths from whom grades were obtained. Each of these differences were small and accounted for less than 1% of the variance. There were no other differences on all other study variables.

3 There is a recent debate in the self-determination theory literature as to whether use or not a relative autonomy index of motivation. Some researchers have suggested to use instead each dimension separately (autonomous and controlled regulations) or to use more complex analyses, such as bi-factor models, permitting to examine both the effect of each single regulation separately as well as a general factor accounting for the quantity of motivation or global self-determination. The choice of the scoring method depends on the research questions and other methodological concerns, such as sample size and design (e.g., Howard et al., 2020). In this study, we considered a relative autonomy index as the most parsimonious solution for both the motivation scale and the motives to engage in an organized activity, given that these variables were only used as control variables or were examined among other activity characteristics. For full transparency, however, we will provide the results of the separate autonomy and controlled dimensions of motivation in the analyses.

4 We analyzed the data again using separate autonomous and controlled measures. For motivation at school, controlling for these two constructs did not change any of the result. For the autonomous and controlled motives for the civic activity, results showed that there was a small positive significant effect of autonomous motives (t = 2.84, p = .005) and a small negative marginally significant effect for controlled motives (t = -1.75, p = .083) on residualized changes in grades. Therefore, it seems more appropriate and powerful to combine these effects in a relative autonomy index (t = 3.18, p = .002).

5 An alternative explanation would be that civic actions are undertaken within the framework of the organized civic activities (or as a consequence of them). If that was the case, there would be an association between civic actions and grades when excluding the variable accounting for participation in civic activities. But this was not the case.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a partnership grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada # 435-2018-0867.