The world as our classroom: Early extracurricular activity participation and elementary school academic growth

摘要

Elementary school children spend the majority of their time outside of school, and increasingly, they spend that time in organized settings in response to declines in neighborhood safety, increased needs for supervision, cries to improve low school achievement, and desires to foster optimal development. Following a developmental ecological perspective, extracurricular activities represent one of many contexts that intertwine to set the stage for developmental change. Further, enduring, cumulative experiences provide a stable environment to promote development across contexts. However, extracurricular activity participation during the early school years generally has not been explored, and the influence of extracurricular duration across the elementary school years on school achievement has been virtually unaddressed. The current study examines (1) children's extracurricular participation in elementary school, (2) the ecological factors associated with extracurricular duration, and (3) the associations between extracurricular duration and reading and mathematics growth and children's approaches toward learning (e.g., eagerness, independence). The study focuses on over 7,000 children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study---Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K) followed from kindergarten through fifth grade. For the latter two research aims, hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was employed to separate out the variation in participation and in achievement attributable to child-level factors versus community-level factors. Large numbers of children experienced arts, sports, and organized clubs as early as school entry, and enrollment continued to increase over the next six years. Duration in these activities averaged about two out of four years surveyed. Variations in participation rates and duration favored children from more advantaged backgrounds (e.g., higher baseline achievement, parent education). In turn, duration in certain activities was positively associated with achievement: sports and organized clubs with mathematics gains, and sports with high approaches toward learning. Baseline achievement moderated associations, with the greatest potential for academic gains from extracurricular duration among children with lower skills at school entry. These findings, among the first focusing on a large, diverse sample of children, demonstrate the potential of continued extracurricular participation in elementary school to promote academic growth for all children, and provide insights for parents, educators, and policy makers regarding after-school programming.