IJREE - International Journal for Research on Extended Education 1/2015

In many countries an increasing importance of activities to support learning and academic achievement that are extracurricular or outside classical institutions like schools, technical schools or universities can be observed. Spending on such public and private support programmes has risen continuously in recent years, as has the demand by participants for such activities. In German-speaking countries these out-of-school and extracurricular educational activities are referred to and studied as non-formal activities or learning contexts/opportunities. In Anglo-American countries terms like after-school programmes, extracurricular activities and organised or designed activities are used. As all these terms and concepts refer to the extension or supplementation of traditional educational institutions and their forms of instruction such as ‘classical’ classroom teaching in schools, in an international context the term ‘extended education’ is used more and more for this form of education. The seven contributions of this issue encompass a wide array of topics and new research developments in the field of extended education in different countries, and they comprise research projects based on qualitative data, as well as projects based on quantitative data.