Abstract
Extracurricular activities play an important role in the school lives of students. To understand this effect, the authors of this article consider public schools in Azerbaijan and analyse the effect of extracurricular activities on students’ academic performance. They conducted a study investigating three groups of extracurricular activities: sports, fine arts and student clubs. For data on academic performance, they used results of a centralised state school examination which assesses students in two subjects: language of instruction (either Azerbaijani or Russian) and mathematics. The results of this study show that some extracurricular activities have a positive effect on students’ academic performance, while others show no effect. Moreover, the authors consider the number of different extracurricular activities a student takes part in and analyse the significance of this number in predicting student success.
Résumé
L’effet des activités extrascolaires sur les résultats des élèves au niveau de l’enseignement secondaire : le cas de l’Azerbaïdjan – Les activités extrascolaires jouent un grand rôle dans la vie scolaire des élèves. Pour en comprendre l’incidence, les auteurs de cet article se sont penchés sur des écoles publiques en Azerbaïdjan et ont analysé l’effet des activités extrascolaires sur les résultats des élèves. Ils ont réalisé une étude portant sur trois groupes d’activités extrascolaires : le sport, les beaux-arts et les clubs d’élèves. Les données sur les résultats scolaires s’appuient sur les résultats obtenus à un examen centralisé de l’école publique, évaluant les élèves dans deux matières : la langue dans laquelle se déroulent les cours (soit en azerbaïdjanais soit en russe) et les mathématiques. Les résultats de cette étude ont montré que certaines activités extrascolaires avaient un effet positif sur les résultats des élèves, tandis que d’autres n’en avaient pas. En outre, les auteurs ont examiné le nombre d’activités extrascolaires différentes auxquelles se livre un élève et analysé l’importance de ce nombre pour prédire sa réussite scolaire.
Резюме
Влияние дополнительных занятий\ внеучебной деятельности на академическую успеваемость в средних школах: анализ примера в Азербайджане – Аннотация: Внеучебная деятельность играет важную роль в жизни школьников. Для полного понимания следствий дополнительных занятий, авторы данной статьи изучили государственные школы в Азербайджане и проанализировали влияние внеучебных мероприятий на академические показатели и успеваемость учеников. Были изучены три группы внеучебных занятий: спорт, художественное искусство и студенческие клубы. Для сбора данных по академической успеваемости, исследователи использовали результаты государственной системы централизованной экзаменации, которая оценивает показатели учеников по двум предметам: языку преподавания (Азербайджанский или Русский) и математике. Результаты исследования выявили, что некоторые внешкольные занятия имеют положительное действие на академические показатели учеников, тогда как некоторые никак на это не влияют. Более того, авторы учли количество разных дополнительных занятий, в которых школьники принимают участие и изучили значительность этого показателя в прогнозировании успехов школьников.
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Notes
Children in Azerbaijan enter primary school (years 1–4) when they are six years old. They progress to lower secondary school (years 5–9), completing this part of formal schooling with a state certificate, thereby fulfilling the minimum compulsory school cycle when they are about 14 years old. A few students then engage in an apprenticeship or attend vocational school. But most go on to upper secondary school (years 10–11), completing this part of their formal schooling with another state certificate when they are about 16 years old. Azerbaijani public schools are state-run; attendance and textbooks are free.
Despite achieving independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the Republic of Azerbaijan still has some schools which have classes/sections with Russian as the language of instruction.
Initially the acronym for Scholastic Aptitude Test, SAT then stood for Scholastic Assessment Test and was later renamed the SAT Reasoning Test (where SAT no longer stands for any three separate words). Often referred to today as simply “the SAT”, it is a standardised college entry exam students need to pass in the United States to gain admission to a college to embark on their undergraduate studies (e.g. for a Bachelor’s degree).
F (named after British statistician Sir Ronald Fisher, 1890–1962) stands for the ratio of two variances; p-value stands for the lowest level of significance at which we can reject the null hypothesis.
t stands for Student’s t-value. It is the test statistic of the distribution of the difference between two sample means.
Named after American statistician Larry V. Hedges, Hedges’ g is a measure of effect size which expresses how much one group differs from another.
Named after American mathematician John Tukey (1915–2000), Tukey’s rule is based on quartiles and identifies values that lie more than 1.5 IQR above Q3 and 1.5 IQR below Q1 as outliers, where IQR is interquartile range, and Q1 and Q3 are first and third quartiles, respectively.
Both Kolmogorov-Smirnov (or KS) and Shapiro-Wilk tests identify whether a sample comes from normal distribution or not.
R-squared is a coefficient of determination, which expresses the proportion of the variance in the dependent variable which can be predicted from the independent variable.
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The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Institute of Education of the Republic of Azerbaijan.
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Abizada, A., Gurbanova, U., Iskandarova, A. et al. The effect of extracurricular activities on academic performance in secondary school: The case of Azerbaijan. Int Rev Educ 66, 487–507 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-020-09833-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-020-09833-2