Background

Extracurriculars are extra activities such as clubs and sports done by students in a school that aren’t part of the regular schedule of classes. From the academic team to the football team, students have a plethora of extracurricular activities to choose from. With such a wide variety of options, many students often find it difficult to decide which extracurriculars to join, or whether to join any at all. Many factors influence a student’s preference for extracurriculars. One of these factors, gender, formed the basis of our study. We were interested in determining whether there was a difference in the number of extracurricular activities joined by boys and girls at North Olmsted High School.

There was not much research done on our topic. Many of the articles we found on our topic were hidden behind paywalls or done in other countries. However, there were a few studies worth discussing.

The Academic Pathways of People Learning Engineering Survey (APPLES), a cross-sectional study for first through senior year college students, observed data sourced from a 2008 sample of 21 educational institutions in the United States. Of the 4,266 valid responses, 3,911 indicated that they would go on to major in engineering related fields. Since the APPLE Study focused on the responses of these 3,911 engineering majors, selection bias is present which may cause any conclusions to differ from those of a more diverse sample or population. Additionally, selection bias is present as a result of the study’s focus on college students, which may cause conclusions to differ from those that would be reached when observing students in lower levels of education. The APPLE Survey consisted of three questions about extracurricular activities. One investigating importance of involvement, one investigating frequency of involvement, and one investigating level of involvement in engineering activities, clubs, or societies. Compared to male students, female students responded to the survey with higher frequencies of involvement in both general extracurricular activities and engineering activities.

<http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED542117.pdf>

Zena R. Mello and Frank C. Worrell wrote a paper in 2008 describing their study on “Trinidadian adolescents’ participation in extracurricular activities in relation to their perceived chances and gender.” In the paper, Zello and Worrell first detail previous studies done on the subject in countries like the United States. Zello and Worrell go into more detail on these previous studies than I could find online in abstracts of the studies so I will discuss the results of the previous studies here. Two studies discussed in the paper were done in 2003, by Eccles, and 2005, by Feldman and Matjasko, in which they both found that adolescent females in the US were more likely to participate in extracurricular activities. These studies, as well as additional studies, found that females participated in more diverse activities than males while males participated in more athletic activities than females. This conclusion was determined to hold true across national boundaries.

Zena and Worrell conducted their study by sampling 1,738 adolescents attending 12 different secondary schools in Trinidad. After excluding certain members of the sample due to extraneous factors, the final sample ended up being 1,385 adolescents. More than half of the sample were aged 13 to 15. Also, the sample was 59% male. The sample included a wide variety of races including those of Caucasian descent, Lebanese descent, African descent, etc. The researchers divided extracurricular activities into five main groups: athletic, artistic, intellectual, religious, and organized groups. The results, as shown in the graph below, showed that females participated in more artistic and religious activities while males participated in more athletic and organized activities, confirming previous research.

 

However, in contrast to the study done by Eccles in the US in which it was found that females participate in more overall extracurricular activities, results in this study showed that males participated in more overall extracurricular activities. These similarities and differences between gender variation in extracurricular activities can be attributed to the differences between nations and schooling systems.

 <http://www.scielo.cl/pdf/psykhe/v17n2/art08.pdf>