Effectiveness of a "Grass Roots" Statewide Enrichment Program for Gifted Elementary School Children

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

  • Jessika Golle
  • Zettler, Ingo
  • Norman Rose
  • Ulrich Trautwein
  • Marcus Hasselhorn
  • Benjamin Nagengast
Enrichment programs provide learning opportunities for a broader or deeper examination of curricular or extracurricular topics and are popular in gifted education. Herein, we investigated the effectiveness of a statewide extracurricular enrichment program for gifted elementary school children in Germany. The program implemented a ”grass roots“ strategy by which local units developed and offered the enrichment courses, which spanned a broad array of topics. The courses targeted different outcomes, including students' cognitive abilities, school achievement, interests, creativity, self-control, self-concept, and social competencies. We compared third-grade students attending the enrichment program (N =423) with nonattending third-grade students (N = 2,328) by means of a propensity score analysis. Specifically, we controlled for potential selection effects and estimated the average causal effect of the enrichment program for children attending the program. The findings revealed positive program effects on academic achievement but not on the other targeted outcomes.
Original languageEnglish
JournalJournal of Research on Educational Effectiveness
Volume11
Issue number3
Pages (from-to)375-408
Number of pages34
ISSN1934-5747
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 3 Jul 2018

    Research areas

  • enrichment program, giftedness, effectiveness, propensity score analysis

Number of downloads are based on statistics from Google Scholar and www.ku.dk


No data available

ID: 210062989