Extracurricular School Activities During the First COVID-19 Lockdown in Italy: Comparative Study with Prior to Lockdown Workshops

This paper has been developed within the framework of a European Social Fund project, which involved a network of three primary-middle schools in Sicily. The extracurricular activities engaged over a thousand students and the workshops were partially carried out during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Italy (March-May 2020). The qualitative-quantitative evaluation focused on the improvement of students’ basic and transversal skills and on the development of an inclusive school environment. The research data were collected by surveying workshops’ students, trainers and teachers-tutors about their point of view on the effectiveness of the intervention. The objective of this study, focused on the quantitative dataset, is the comparison of the above-mentioned activities which took place before and during the pandemic emergency and eventually identify any discrepancies.