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Four hundred twenty-four students in Grades 6 through 12 and 1 parent of each completed a questionnaire concerning student participation in 5 types of after-school activities: homework, television viewing, extracurricular activities, other types of structured after-school groups, and jobs. Student standardized achievement test scores and class grades were also obtained. After-school activities contributed significantly to the prediction of achievement even after the student's gender, grade level, ethnicity, free-lunch eligibility, and level of adult supervision after school were statistically controlled. Generally, more time in extracurricular activities and other structured groups and less time in jobs and television viewing were associated with higher test scores and class grades. More time on homework was associated with better grades. The joint effects of all 5 after-school activities nearly doubled the predictive ability of any single activity.

Although the structure, processes, and content of classroom instruction are certainly the major influences on achievement, characteristics of individual students and their families and how students spend their nonschool hours are also important contributors to how well students do in school. Researchers investigating factors that affect student academic achievement have focused on numerous influences that are external to the classroom. Among the student background variables, gender (Eccles, 1994), ethnicity (Gray-Little & Carels, 1997), and family socioeconomic status (SES; Tucker, Harris, Brady, & Herman, 1996) are widely regarded as the most influential individual differences. Among activities out of school, attention has focused mainly on time spent doing homework, watching television, participating in extracurricular activities and other structured after-school groups, and in employment.

This article presents a study...