Massive financial resources were invested towards the construction and development of all-day schools in Germany due to the unfavorable results in the first PISA-cycle (Ertl, 2006). Since then the number of all-day primary schools in Germany has quintupled resulting in more than two thirds of the primary schools in Germany being all-day schools in 2017. Enhancing students’ achievement and reducing unequal educational chances are central objectives of implementing all-day schools in Germany. Central goals of all-day schooling are to enhance students’ achievement and to reduce inequality of educational opportunities (KMK, 2015).

Reading literacy is a key competence for children to be successful in school and an essential condition for participating in society. At the end of primary school education almost twenty percent of German students have insufficient reading literacy skills (Bos et al., 2017). Furthermore, reading achievement is related to gender, social and immigration background in Germany (Hußmann et al., 2017). According to Artelt et al. (2007) schools are primary places for knowledge transfer and therefore play a decisive role in supporting children’s development of reading literacy. This applies even more so for all-day schools. Research on educational effectiveness emphazises that classroom processes are important for students’ learning (Creemers & Kyriakides, 2008), regarding cognitive and motivational learning processes. In their model Klieme, Pauli & Reusser (2009) present three basic dimensions of teaching quality – supportive climate for learning, effective classroom management and cognitive activation – that are critical for student learning and motivation.

However, longitudinal studies examining German all-day schools showed no impact of students’ participation in extracurricular reading activities on the development of reading competencies, as well asno compensatory effect for socially disadvantaged children (Sauerwein et al., 2016; Tillmann et al., 2017), even when the instructional quality within the activities are considered. Additionally, findings indicate selective participation in reading related activities in German all-day primary schools: girls and students with higher baseline reading achievement are more likely to attend reading activities (Rollett et al., 2020).

So far, only few results are available from German-speaking countries regarding effects of participation in reading related extracurricular learning activities on reading achievement. Schüpbach (2014) reports that primary school students in Switzerland who took part in extracurricular learning arrangements show a higher increase in reading achievement compared to students not participating. Though Sauerwein et al. (2016) found no general effect of attending reading related activities for students in secondary schools, they discovered that students’ development of reading achievement was greater when students participated voluntarily.

The presented paper is based on our intervention study “StEG-Reading”. Within the project we developed, implemented and evaluated the ‘Investigators Club’, an extracurricular reading activity for the all-day school setting. It was also supposed to be suitable for non-teaching-staff and therefore contains elaborate instructions for implementation. It focusses on training cognitive reading strategies and improving reading fluency, which are successful tools to foster reading achievement (Hattie, 2009).

Research questions

1)      Does participating in the ‘Investigators Club’ improve students’ development of reading comprehension?

2)      Does the instructional quality influence the impact the participation in the ‘Investigators Club’ has on the development of reading comprehension?

3)      Is instruction quality dependent on the instructors’ educational qualification?

We surveyed 1.085 fourth-grade students within 22 German all-day primary schools to compare the development of reading comprehension of participants (n = 311) and non-participants. All students were examined in a pre-/post-intervention design by reading tests. Therefore, we used the results of the nationwide standardized VERA tests on reading competences in the second term of third grade. To describe the development of these competences we tested the students again using tasks with higher difficulty from the VERA task-pool in the second term of fourth grade. Furthermore, students’ answered questionnaires prior to the beginning of the intervention and after it had ended. To include individual and school-related conditions, we also examined the students’ parents, teachers, the additional staff and the schools’ principals. Missing values were estimated by using multiple Imputation accomplished with the R-Package mice (van Buuren et al., 2011). Analyses were conducted using SPSS 25 and the R-package survey (Lumley, 2019). First, we examined the effect of participation in the intervention based on longitudinal data. Second, we analyzed the impact of the three basic dimensions of instructional quality on reading comprehension for students who took part in the ‘Investigators Club’. Third, we tested if students’ ratings regarding the instructional quality differ when looking at the instructors’ educational qualification.

Results show that students participating in the ’Investigators Club’ develop more positively than students who do not participate regarding their reading comprehension. Concerning the three dimensions of instructional quality within the reading activity preliminary analyses reveal no impact of effective classroom management and supportive climate for learning on students reading comprehension, but indicate a positive effect of higher rated cognitive activation on the reading comprehension development. For those instructors who answered the questionnaires we want to examine if the educational qualifications (teachers, non-teachers) lead to different ratings for the instructional quality by students. Since the reading activity was designed with elaborated instructions for implementation we do not expect to find differences in the instructional quality for instructors’ educational qualification.

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