A new report suggests that too much time spent on enrichment activities outside of school is a harmful double whammy for young people, as it stalls cognitive skill growth and induces a decline in non-cognitive skills. Perhaps even worse, there appears to be very little positive benefit associated with even modest amounts of enrichment. While the analysts’ math checks out, parents and pundits alike will still have questions.
Data come from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), touted as the world’s longest running nationally representative panel survey, with almost fifty years of data on the same families and their descendants. University of Georgia researchers Carolina and Gregorio Caetano, along with Eric Nielsen of the Federal Reserve Board, focus on ten years of data from the PSID’s Child Development Supplement (CDS). Specifically, they zero in on the 1997, 2002, and 2007 waves of the CDS, which include time-diary data of students from pre-K through twelfth grade—reported by children or their parents, depending on age—as well as measures of cognitive and noncognitive skills. The robust data also allow the analysts to build controls related to child, family, and environmental characteristics.
The sample consists of 4,330 children ranging in age from five to eighteen years. We get no detail on how these children were specifically chosen. While the grade ranges of pre-K–5, 6–8, and 9–12 are roughly equally represented in the sample, with about one-third of the observations in each, other demographic details provided don’t seem particularly representative of the population at large. Approximately 40 percent of the children are Black, and 7 percent are Hispanic. Twenty-six percent attend a gifted program—far above the current 6 percent as reported by NAGC—8 percent attend a special education program, 1 percent are homeschooled, and 8 percent attend a private school.
Cognitive skills are measured by three assessments: the standardized letter-word, applied problems, and passage comprehension subtests of the Woodcock Johnson Revised Tests of Achievement, results of which are available for each CDS wave. Non-cognitive skills are measured in thirty-six different dimensions by parents’ answers to CDS survey questions and include things like “cheats or tells lies,” “argues too much,” “admired by other children,” and “does neat careful work.” Time diaries from CDS include full twenty-four-hour breakdowns of one random weekday and one random weekend day for each child. The original data coded activities into more than 300 categories. The present study aggregates these into eight: Class time, sleep, play and social activities, passive leisure, duties/chores, enrichment activities, broader enrichment activities, and a miscellaneous category for everything else.
The analysts define enrichment as “the kinds of activities that are typically considered to be investments in children’s skills” undertaken outside of school time. Their main enrichment category includes homework, reading for pleasure, before- and after-school programs, non-academic lessons (like cooking or violin), and other academic lessons (like tutoring or math camp). The “broader enrichment” category adds other familiar activities like structured team sports, art classes, museum excursions, and volunteering. While no two parents would likely break out these activities the same way, the analysts test their models with both enrichment categories and find similar results. They also perform robustness checks using different aggregations of the non-cognitive skills categories.
The model produces some attention-getting results. The full-sample analysis indicates that that enrichment time, when corrected for selection on unobservable factors that might influence the findings, has no significant effect on cognitive skills—the very goal for which the activities were undertaken—and a concurrent significant, negative effect on non-cognitive skills. These negative effects were visible and significant across all grade levels, but most pronounced at the high school level. On average, children in the sample spend about forty-five minutes per day on enrichment activities, but that adds up over a typical week, driving increasing the downward pressure on non-cognitive skills with each additional hour.
What’s going on with these counter-intuitive findings? The full answer is beyond the realm of this paper, but the analysts have some ideas. The simplest is that homework, the largest time use in the enrichment category (66 percent) and also tested by the analysts in isolation from all other activities in the category, doesn’t serve to increase cognitive skills as intended. One clear question here is whether the activities are perhaps disconnected from the cognitive skills tests given. Parents and pundits know that many enrichment activities are general in nature—aimed at developing well-rounded kiddos—but homework and tutoring are typically specific to classes and tests. Would the model show different results if actual class grades/GPAs/state test scores were used to indicate cognitive skills growth? Feels like a robustness check worth running! Less in question, though, seems to be the increase in negative aspects of measured non-cognitive skills. The more enrichment engaged in, the sadder, more irritable, and more inferior to peers the sample students felt. The higher homework load traditionally experienced by high schoolers would match the more pronounced effects seen at the 9–12 grade level.
Another suggestion is that it’s all a matter of time use substitution. Every time use in the enrichment category (but especially homework) is taking up hours that could be used for other activities—the analysts suggest socializing and sleeping—that research indicates are correlated with improved non-cognitive skills. Older children, with more demands on their time as they approach high school graduation, are apparently choosing to forgo these beneficial activities more than their younger brothers and sisters—which probably accords with parental experience outside the confines of a dataset—and are experiencing the negative effects more strongly.
It is unlikely that the authors were trying to antagonize parents working hard to do right by their children, but the results of this study are apt to dismay and alarm some parents. Questions may linger as to the sample and the methodology, but the main point stands: Finding the perfect balance of out-of-school activities to maximize cognitive and non-cognitive skill building for kids is not as simple as it seems. This research doesn’t give a solid answer as to what the balance should be, but the authors’ outcomes hint that it could be a different mix than many families have experienced.
SOURCE: Carolina Caetano, Gregorio Caetano, and Eric Nielsen, “Are children spending too much time on enrichment activities?” Economics of Education Review (January 2024).
