participation in athletics and vocational clubs. In other activities, DNQ students
reported watching more TV and working more hours at an after-school job than QNA
students.
As indicated in Table 3, participation rate differences based on ability were largest
for academic club participation where QNA students were 1.29 times as likely to participate
in an academic club as DNQ students. However, QNA students were only 0.66
times as likely to participate in vocational clubs as DNQ students. Similarly, the 95%
confidence intervals for all Cliff’s deltas for all ability comparisons except homework
did not include zero, indicating that differences between groups were not just statistical
in nature. The largest differences between QNA and DNQ students on the nondichotomous
outcomes were in time spent working at a job or watching TV (both
favoring lower ability students). Taken together, these findings indicated that even
within a high-ability sample, relative ability level appears to differentiate how adolescents
spend their time outside the classroom.
Attendance Differences (TIP vs. QNA)
Unlike ability group comparisons, there was only one statistically significant difference
between TIP and QNA groups after the propensity matching; QNA students were
more likely to participate in service clubs than TIP attendees. There were no statistically
significant differences between the groups on the other activities. Although statistically
significant, the relative participation differences between groups were not
extremely large. TIP attendees were 0.75 times as likely to report participating in a
service club. Although the Mann–Whitney test was not statistically significant, there
was a minor difference between TIP and QNA students for hours spent working at a
job (0.20). With so few significant differences between these groups compared with
the ability-level comparisons, the present findings indicate that attendance at a summer
program does not appear to be associated with differences based on how time is
spent outside the classroom during the school year.
Male–Female Differences
Similar to findings from the general student population, the current study reveals that
males and females spend their time in different ways. In the overall male–female
comparisons across all students, there were statistically significant participation differences
on nearly every variable. Females reported higher rates of participation in
academic clubs, spending more time on homework, and spending more time using a
computer for homework than males (see Table 2). In terms of nonacademic activities,
females reported higher rates of participation across all activity types, including total
types of school-related activities, with the sole exception of athletics, where there was
no significant difference (see Table 6). Overall, males reported spending more time
watching more TV and were more likely to not report participating in activities than
females (see Tables 3 and4).