Abstract:

The beneficial role of extracurricular activities on academic performance and social behaviour has been acknowledged and confirmed in numerous recent studies (Hansen et al. 2003, Darling et al. 2005 a.o.), which regard them as powerful resources for developing learners’ essential competences.

In the Romanian educational system, there have been many extracurricular initiatives, including school-sanctioned projects, which are organised outside the formal educational setting and whose role is to complement formal education by developing both transversal and specialized competences in students. However, there is a scarcity of studies dealing with the students’ feedback on how these projects respond to their real needs and correlate with the objectives of their formal education. To fill this gap, this research tackles important issues regarding the impact of such projects by addressing the following questions: Do these projects meet the needs and expectations of students? Are they correlated with the objectives of the educational process? How are the educational outcomes of these projects assessed? Are there any assessment instruments to assess the impact on students’ progress? Accordingly, the objective of this research is to identify the impact of extracurricular projects on the students’ training from their own point of view, as direct beneficiaries of these educational activities.

To this purpose, we investigated the feedback of a group of Romanian teenage students, aged 17-18, from two high-schools in Craiova, by means of a questionnaire-based quantitative research. In order to obtain clear, unequivocal answers, as well as exclude any undue discrimination based on how articulate respondents are (Wilson and McLean 1994: 21), the questionnaire included 12 dichotomous and multiple choice questions. We collected 228 valid responses out of 280 administered questionnaires, which were subject to quantitative analysis, in order to understand if and how the students make the shift from mere participation to active engagement.

The results pointed to the students’ interest in participating in such projects, even if the concept of ‘project’ was not very clear to them. The respondents identified a set of 3 transversal competences developed within the extracurricular projects: creativity, responsibility, and communication in their native language and highlighted 3 school subjects to which they made greater progress: Foreign Languages, Romanian and Computer Science. Overall, the results showed that the respondents were aware of both the educational and social benefits of the projects they were involved in and that they are not used to answering such questionnaires and doing self-reflexive exercises.

In conclusion, this study indicates that in the Romanian educational system there is still a need for a better correlation of the extracurricular and curricular activities in the benefit of developing the students’ both transversal and specialised competences. Moreover, the projects should be better tuned to students' needs and expectations through a continuous dialogue between all major actors in the educational setting.

Keywords:

Extracurricular projects, competences, students’ feedback, impact.