Out-of-School Time-Use Portfolios and Taiwanese Children’s Reading Achievement

Abstract

In this study, we investigated how Taiwanese 5th graders spent time on six out-of-school activities, including homework, after-school private programs, print-based reading, online reading, online films/games, and TV, and documented time-use portfolios and their reading achievement. Using a cluster analysis, we identified five distinct groups of students that shared similar patterns of time use for the six activities to provide a more complete picture on what students do outside of school. The findings suggested that Group 1, which invested more time in homework and in overall academic activities, demonstrated good performance on both Chinese character recognition and reading comprehension. Moreover, the performance of Group 2 indicated that those spending a favorable ratio of time on reading seemed to be equally successful despite their spending relatively less time on homework and academic activities in total than other groups. Finally, Group 4 and especially Group 5, which spent too much time on online films/games and overall entertainment activities tended to performed more poorly than the other groups.