A substantive body of research demonstrates that programs for young people have a range of positive benefits including academic achievement, career exploration and development, and social, emotional and civic skills. However, many programs do not realize this potential -- often due to the lack of coordination and support about how to assess and…

The mental health of Maryland's youth has grown steadily worse for more than a decade, with COVID-19 exacerbating the trend. In an attempt to respond to rising student social, emotional, and academic needs, states including Maryland received a substantial increase in revenue through the allocation of American Rescue Plan Elementary and Secondary…

The current Disability Employment Service (DES) model serving autistic job seekers in Australia will end in the year 2023. The Australian Government is exploring new options for a replacement model. Aiding these efforts a systematic review of the literature examined the evidence base of effective assisted employment supports for autistic people in…

Positive Behaviour Support is an applied behaviour analytic system of support that is utilised in schools and in residential care settings for children and adults with disabilities who engage in challenging behaviour. Implementation fidelity depends on appropriate staff training and organisational behaviour management. A systematic literature…

Outside School Hours Care (OSHC) provides play, leisure, care and education for significant numbers of Australian children. As government has become increasingly involved in the regulation of OSHC, the sector has become increasingly professionalised. OSHC practitioners are active participants in quality improvement processes and increasingly…

Training frontline staff to respond to and manage challenging behaviors of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) poses a pervasive problem in the delivery of treatment services. Traditional synchronous staff training methods are expensive, time-consuming, and often do not result in high treatment integrity. Video Modeling alternative to…

More than 1.6 million children and youth in the United States attend 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLCs), which are federally funded after-school programs available in each state, particularly for students who attend high poverty and low-performing schools (US Department of Education, 2020). These 10,125 centers are intended to do…

Appropriate, efficient and effective staff training and development programmes have the tendency to enhance work performance in an organisation. The study analysed technical staffs' conception of training and development (T&D) and its influence on work performance in the University of Cape Coast. The mixed methods approach was used to collect…

Services for youth experiencing homelessness (YEH) are designed with limited input from the youth themselves. This study explored the experiences and recommendations for services aimed at mitigating the negative effects of homelessness among youth. A total of 45 interviews were conducted with YEH (ages 15 to 24, M = 21.5 years) who experienced at…

Paraeducators play an important role in the education of students with significant disabilities. They can best contribute to improving student outcomes when they are skilled in using evidence-based practices. Tiered training is a practical and promising solution for how teachers can train teams of paraeducators to use evidence-based practices.…

Black staff in out-of-school time (OST) programs are frequently positioned as disciplinarians, behavior managers, or "chaperones," while curriculum and instruction responsibilities are assigned to formally trained (and often White) educators. Imbalances in power and funding mean White leaders usually hold decision-making authority, while…

We evaluated the effectiveness of an online training on palliative care knowledge and self-efficacy among staff working with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) using a one-group pretest-posttest design. Staff from four nonprofit residential and day services organizations in a U.S. Midwestern state participated. Among 132…

Background: Staff play a critical role in promoting positive youth development in out-of-school-time programs, yet little is known about best-practices for preparing staff to work with youth and meet their needs. The present study seeks to understand the impact of a basic psychological needs training on the staff's ability to deliver…

We examined adult behavioral skills training (BST) for home-based therapeutic support staff (TSS) using a naturalistic developmental behavioral intervention (NDBI) with young children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) derived from Project ImPACT. We taught three TSS to use interactive strategies with online modules, in-vivo training, and ongoing…

Background: Australian disability services must comply with quality standards defined by federal government. Standards are abstract, focus on paperwork and rarely describe what good service quality looks like in practice. This research explored frontline day service staff's perceptions of good service quality to identify ways that it may be better…