After-school activity
[2] An after-school activity is any organized program that youth or adult learner voluntary can participate in outside of the traditional school day.
After World War II, the number of single parent families in the United States increased as women began to participate in the labor force.
After-school programs, then, had the significant function of serving as a place where children could receive safe adult supervision after school hours, allowing parents to continue working without the worry of their child’s safety or well-being.
[11] During the World War, after-school programs served as a solution to the decline in child labor and offered supervision for families active in the working economy.
From the existing set of after-school study providers the ones most sought after are the ones with individualized learning modules that complement the K-12 school syllabus.
Way2Success Learning Systems is the first for-profit provider in India of academically oriented individualized after-school programs that complement the school syllabus.
Their staff provides information, guidance, and emotional support regarding a wide range of issues that youths face in often high-risk neighborhoods.
Elementary students who participate in the Beans and Rice after school programs are given a snack, tutoring, active play opportunities, and positive role models.
THINK Together, California's largest non-profit provider, contracts with approximately 20 Southern California school district partners to run and manage academically oriented after-school programs at approximately 200 school sites located across Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties.
[3] Likewise, in a 2010 article, scholars Wu and Van Egeren found that some parents enroll their students in after-school programs in order to give them a supervised, safe place to spend time.
[19] Many after-school activities take place in the afternoons of school days, on the weekends, or during the summer, thereby helping working parents with childcare.
[20][21] Since adolescents are old enough to be left unsupervised, they have a higher risk of engaging in criminal behavior than young children do, which may increase the perceived need for constructive after-school programs, as Cook, Godfredson, and Na argue in their 2010 article in the journal Crime and Justice.
[22] In the United States, interest in utilizing after-school programs for delinquency-prevention increased dramatically after research found that juvenile arrest rates peak between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. on school days.
[25] Similarly, a 2010 study by Durlak, Weissberg, and Pachan showed that both children and adolescents experienced significant academic gains by taking part in afterschool programs.
Morrison et al. (2000) studied 350 at-risk students, half of whom participated in an after-school program that provided homework assistance, tutoring, and cultural enrichment activities.
Together, these studies indicate that after-school academic support may play a protective role by helping to prevent a loss of school engagement even if it doesn't result in higher levels of functioning.
Minority, low income, urban settings, "at-risk", and other negative connotations labeling youth's hinder academic achievements.
[6] The Posner and Vandell study showed that students who had taken part in an after-school program also exhibited more emotional stability and signs of social adjustment than their counterparts.
[8] In her 2005 study of efforts to address the racial achievement gap in urban areas, psychologist Julie Bryan noted that after-school activities can strongly benefit a student's socio-emotional health and academic performance.
[31] One aspect of this success is that after-school activities give students the opportunity to deepen relationships with adult mentors, such as sports coaches, teachers, and community leaders.
Research shows that having caring and supportive adult presences in the lives of students greatly increases their sense of self-worth, academic achievement, and capabilities for resiliency in the face of adverse circumstances like poverty and abuse.
[31][32] A 2000 study by Gutman and Migley connects the benefits of students having close relationships with caring adults with a decrease in the achievement gap.
[38] This has the potential to lead to lasting psychological issues amongst children, such as poorly developed independence and coping skills, low self-esteem, and stress- and anxiety-related disorders.
By spending so much time in organized after-school activities that their parents signed them up for, the children that Levine worked with failed to adequately develop self-management, which is a powerful precursor to both psychological inner strength and academic achievement.
