After-School Pursuits, Ethnicity, and Achievement for 8th- and 10th-Grade Students

Abstract

The purpose of this article was to examine students' after-school pursuits in a categorization framework and to consider the association of the pursuits with achievement after disaggregating the data by ethnicity. Student pursuits were categorized as in- or out-of-school, academic or nonacademic, organized or unorganized instead of simply in or out of school. For example, varsity football would be categorized as in-school, nonacademic, organized. A sample of 8,305 8th- and 10th-grade students who were enrolled in both years and had complete data was drawn from the National Education Longitudinal Study (1988) data set. The authors used multiple regression to analyze the models by ethnic background and found that different pursuits had differing levels of association after disaggregating by ethnicity. Also, classifying all after-school pursuits into 1 or 2 categories masked important differences in their associations with achievement.