Not everything helps the same for everyone: relevance of extracurricular activities for academic achievement

Abstract Participation in organized Extracurricular Activities has contributed to improve academic achievement. However, this does not happen in the same way; it depends on sex, age, or parental educational level. Our objective is to know the importance of these factor interactions’ in the explanation of academic achievement. The sample consisted of 1148 adolescents, aged between 12 and 18 years, 52% of whom were female. Participants completed the Extracurricular Activities questionnaire, and academic and sociodemographic data were collected. The results show that differences in academic achievement depend on the adolescent stage. In early adolescence, girls improve in academic achievement, as well as with better parental education, reading of books and activity duration. On the contrary, in the middle and late adolescence, academic achievement improves with not participating in collective sports and reduced activity breadth, although parental educational level follows the same trend as in the early adolescence. These results reinforce the evolutionary hypothesis of specialization in the choice of activities throughout adolescence. In this sense, some proposals for schools that advocate for greater integration of curricular and non-curricular elements are discussed.