BELLEZA, Isabella Marie N.

XI-5 Our Lady of Peace

Linking Extracurricular Programming to Academic Achievement: Who Benefits and Why?

Beckett A. Broh’s

Numerous longitudinal studies have suggested that there is a positive link between

extracurricular activities and academic achievement. This link and its potential benefits leave

researchers speculating for decades with hands only on limited evidences that it exists. Their

studies tend to overlook factors that may greatly affect students' academic achievement. Therefore,

the results of most literature indicating that extracurricular is unrelated to students' educational

achievement is debatable, especially among researchers studying this kind of relationship.

Overlooked factors also lead to failure of their studies to answer questions such as how

extracurricular programming, specifically sports, promote achievement and whether or not

different forms of extracurricular activities provide unique advantages for students as well. This

paper discusses the link between extracurricular participation and academic achievement with the

attempt to further discuss exactly how extracurricular influences achievement, the influence

among different forms of extracurricular and what other factors influence this relationship.

Broh makes use of methods and analytical strategies that show potential to address the

factors that have been overlooked by past researchers. First, the NELS database is utilized to

collect the students' grades to determine whether or not participation in interscholastic sports affect

students’ grades and test scores. Second, students were asked to answer developmental model,

leading-crowd hypothesis, and social capital model geared questionnaires. These three tackle the

possibility of other factors’ influence on students' academic achievement. Finally, additional

analyses were performed on other extracurricular activities. This is to be able to generalize the

results of interscholastic sports to other forms of extracurricular activity. These models take a look

at the research topic in unique perspectives. Nonetheless, all would still contribute greatly to the
manifestation of an answer as to whether or not extracurricular programming could be linked to

academic achievement.

The findings of the research were able to show a significant link between high school

interscholastic sports and academic performance. Through the careful analysis of the students’

grades, it’s evident that there is a positive association of participating in interscholastic sports with

students’ Mathematics and English grades even after ground characteristics are dealt with. The

Developmental Model contributed evidence that sports participation is advantageous in developing

students’ self-esteem, locus of control and, time on homework thus, directly supporting students’

academic achievement. The Leading-Crowd Hypothesis shows that sports participation offers

athletes a greater chance to be a part of academically oriented peer groups. This could benefit

students’ academic performance, however, this is a weak link compared to other mechanisms.

Improvement in the grades of students’ more than their test scores were associated to increase in

social capital caused by participation of the student in sports. It was deduced that the effect of

interscholastic sports differ from other extracurricular activities such as intramural sports, music

groups, drama clubs, the student council and even the yearbook committee. All these programs

have unique contributions to academic achievement except for intramural sports. Therefore, most

of the other extracurricular activities analyzed in the research showed that there is a positive link

between participation in extracurricular but interscholastic sports athletes gain benefit the most.

The objectives of this paper are similar and the results are relevant for the group’s research

topic, “How does the Involvement in Extracurricular Affect the Adolescent Development and

Academic Performance of Students?” Similarly, both tackle the discovery on how extracurricular

participation among students affect their academic performance and possibly aid in the finding of

other variables that help develop the positive link between the two.
 Beckett, B. (2002, January). Linking Extracurricular Programming to Academic
Achievement: Who Benefits and Why? [PDF]