Effects of Extracurricular Activities and Quality on Primary School-Age Student’s Achievement in Mathematics in Switzerland

• In Event: Utilizing Out-of-School-Time Program Strategies to Reduce Risk and Promote Positive Social, Emotional, and Academic Outcomes

Abstract

At present, Switzerland is debating the future priority of afterschool programs and extracurricular programs and how they should be developed for primary-school children. An important education policy argument for the expansion of these programs is that extracurricular activities can better facilitate a positive development of children. There is no research on the effectiveness or the effects of extracurricular programs in Switzerland yet. There are a few studies investigating these effects in relation to student’s outcomes in the German speaking-part of Europe, where similar movements have developed in the last few years. Studies in the USA focus mainly on afterschool programs with a few dedicated to examinations of extracurricular activities. Several studies concerning afterschool programs show positive correlations between cognitive outcomes and attendance (Durlak & Weissberg, 2007; Mahoney et al., 2005). Furthermore studies show that the process quality of the offerings is an important factor (Mahoney et al., 2005). However, the results of these studies cannot be generalised or applied without examining the varying Swiss circumstances.

The research project EduCare presented in this paper is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and takes place in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. This longitudinal study addresses questions relating the quality of different settings of institutional (all-day schools and schools with core times [Blockzeiten]) to their effects on children’s achievement in mathematics in the first three years of school (age 6-9). As a conceptual framework of these studies we developed a model on quality and effectiveness of school curricular and extracurricular activities based on Radisch et al. (2008), where we developed and applied in the StEG-Study, Helmke (2004) and Pekrun and Helmke (1991). For measuring quality, our study starts out from a structural/process model by Tietze (1998). The model attempts to combine dynamic and dimensional approaches. In drawing the sample, we asked all of the all-day schools in Switzerland – our smallest basic experimental group – that met our criteria to participate. Based on socio-demographic data on the municipalities in which the schools are located, we selected schools in comparable municipalities in the 11 German-speaking cantons of Switzerland (N= schools= 35; N=43 classes; N= 295 students). The municipalities are mainly urban or part of agglomerations. In our paper we are going to focus on the following questions: How do students in all-day schools develop in mathematics compared to the control group? How do these students develop in addition in consideration of the school setting’s educational quality? The results show, that at the end of grade 3 children in all-day schools tend to do better in mathematics than children in schools with core times. In addition the achievement is different depending on the process quality of school and extracurricular activites. The results of this study are consistent with the research overview and tend to be more favourable towards the cognitive area compared to previous results in Switzerland and Germany. Already after three years the available findings show amazingly concise effects of the different school forms.

Author

• Marianne Schuepbach, University of Bern