Mahoney, J. L, Cairns, B. D., & Farmer, T. W. (2003). Promoting interpersonal competence and educational success through extracurricular activity participation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(2), 409-418.
This article is a little on the outdated side of things, but I wanted to read it anyway because it seems to have an interesting take on the “why” component of extracurricular activity participation leads to good things (in this case, educational attainment). The authors take on the hypothesis that the nature of school-based extracurricular activities promotes adaptive goal skills (sounds awfully like SOC to me, although they use Larson’s term “initiative”) that are a critical aspect of promoting both interpersonal competence and increased educational aspirations. In turn (hah! got that in there), interpersonal competence (maintaining positive relationships, avoiding conflicts) has been an excellent predictor of educational attainment, as has educational aspirations (duh). The authors found support for this hypothesis, and also found that the relationship between consistent participation and educational success was especially strong for youth who started out with low interpersonal skills. Of course, this might be due to some ceiling effects with the initially interpersonally confident kids, but still an interesting bit of support for extracurricular participation as an “intervention” of sorts.
Nothing show-stopping, but a well-written, well-analyzed (SEM!) piece with a nice set of longitudinal data. 8 out of 10 Jetts.
Megan, in what way was the article outdated? Also, don't be so ready to dismiss the aspirations/achievement link as an obvious finding! Aspirations can be different from expectations, and there is a lot that can happen between cognitions about the future and actual goal attainment.
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