Extracurricular activities and refugee students in Turkish educational settings: a systematic review

Turkey hosts the world's largest refugee population, and extracurricular activities have increasingly been positioned as potential supports for refugee students' psycho-social adjustment, school belonging, and peer integration. However, a comprehensive synthesis of ECA-related outcomes for refugee students in Turkish educational settings remains absent from the literature. This systematic review examined the associations between extracurricular activity participation and refugee student outcomes across psychological, social, and educational settings-related domains. Following PRISMA guidelines, studies were evaluated using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT), and findings were integrated through the Systematic What Is Known (SWIM) framework. Findings suggest that ECAs are associated with potential improvements in school attachment, perceived social wellbeing, and aspects of psychological adjustment; however, outcomes varied substantially across studies and participant groups, and the overall certainty of evidence remained low to very low. The findings further suggest that many extracurricular activities operate primarily within an integration-oriented framework, producing individual-level benefits without consistently addressing relational and structural barriers to equitable participation. The review highlights the importance of culturally responsive facilitation, inclusion-oriented programme design, and greater attention to refugee students' own perspectives in future research and practice. Overall, extracurricular activities appear promising but insufficiently understood mechanisms for supporting refugee students' inclusion and psycho-social adjustment within educational settings.

Open Science Framework (OSF), https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/EG4X8.