Academic Effects of After-School Programs (continued)

Parents with higher educational levels and more income tend to influence their children to participate in educationally beneficial activities and can pay for more enrichment lessons than can parents with lower education and less income. However, some parents living in inner-city neighborhoods expend great amounts of energy to seek out resources for their children. Importantly, after-school program attendance provides children from low-income families with access to the types of enrichment activities that middle-class children typically experience (Hofferth & Jankuniene, 2001).

Community characteristics also bear on who participates and how this participation affects them. Program shortages are most pronounced in urban and rural areas, and programs for children from low-income families struggle with limited funding and resources. These limitations affect their quality (Halpern, 1999; National Institute on Out-of-School Time, 2001). There is some evidence that after-school programs are more beneficial for children from high-risk communities than for middle-class children.

Research on Academic Effects of After-School Programs

In evaluating the effects of programs on children's school performance, it is important for researchers to consider the individual, family, or community differences in children participating in programs in their research design so that the effects of those preexisting differences among participants and nonparticipants are not mistakenly attributed to programs. The research on program effects cited here does consider possible selection effects but is based on small, nonrepresentative samples of children.

Attendance is an important factor in evaluating the effects of after-school programs on children's school adjustment. Some researchers (Pettit et al., 1997) found that children who participated in some (1-3 hours a day) activities after school were rated by their teachers as having better social skills and fewer acting-out behavior problems than children who participated either in no activities or more activities each week. Pierce and Vandell (1999) demonstrated that academically at-risk children who attended after-school programs more frequently, as compared with children who attended less often, developed better work habits in their school classrooms, attended school more often, and endorsed less aggressive strategies to resolve conflicts with peers. Program attendance was related to program quality. That study and others found that children resist attending programs where staff is negative and activities are limited, boring, and inflexible.

Some research has established links between regulatable program features, staff-child interactions, activities in programs, and children's school adjustment. Lower adult-child ratios and higher levels of staff education are associated with more positive interactions, less negativity, and more flexible and age-appropriate activities in after-school programs. Pierce, Hamm, and Vandell (1999) found that classroom teachers reported that boys had fewer behavior problems when staff were more positive with the children in their after-school programs. Exposure to more negative emotional climates in after-school programs was associated with lower reading and mathematics grades for boys. Those boys who attended programs that allowed them to make choices about activities were rated by their first-grade teachers as having better social skills with peers in the classroom than were boys enrolled in less flexible programs.