The National Guard Youth ChalleNGe program is a residential, quasi-military program that serves young people ages 16 to 18 who are struggling to complete their high school credential. This is the ninth report in an annual series that RAND researchers have issued. The prior annual reports cover 2015 through 2022. Each annual report documents the…

Mental health challenges for youth continue to be a growing concern. Youth-serving organizations have the potential to play a significant role in recognizing the signs and symptoms of mental health challenges in youth. The Youth Mental Health First Aid (YMHFA) training course is widely used to equip adults working with youth with skills to support…

The National Guard Youth ChalleNGe program is a residential, quasi-military program for youth ages 16 to 18 who are experiencing difficulty in traditional high school. This report covers the program years 2018-2019 and is the fourth in a series of annual reports that RAND Corporation researchers have issued over the course of a research project…

Many Extension precollege programs seek to increase young people's interest in and aspirations toward college by fostering the development of skills that support a successful college transition. By pairing existing data with participant enrollment records, Extension professionals can more easily capture the impact of precollege programs on college…

"Measure, Use, Improve! Data Use in Out-of-School Time" shares the experience and wisdom from a broad cross-section of out-of-school time professionals, ranging from internal evaluators, to funders, to researchers, to policy advocates. Key themes of the volume include building support for learning and evaluation within out-of-school time…

The rapid growth of the U.S. Latinx population has led to an increased need for community organizations and academic institutions to develop partnerships focused on addressing gaps in health maintenance and education of Latinx individuals. Medical schools also have a responsibility to educate future physicians in delivering culturally sensitive…

Including youth in the development and evaluation of out-of-school time (OST) programs has positive effects on youth, the organizations that serve them, and the communities in which they live. Such involvement can improve young people's social competence, foster leadership and engagement, and empower groups. Youth provide unique perspectives on…

Afterschool programs can offer enriching opportunities, homework help and a safe environment. To ensure that these programs are cohesive, high-quality and widely available, many cities have designed community-wide systems to coordinate the various afterschool programs offered by different providers. Having a way to collect and share reliable data…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore sonic play in close proximity to a music, literacy and songwriting for social change community-based initiative. The authors leverage ideas about time, space and narrative under the concept of sonic flux to understand youth's sonic and aural play on digital beatmaking technologies. In doing so, the authors break…

Commonly described as youth-led or youth-driven, the youth-adult partnership (Y-AP) model has gained increasing popularity in out-of-school time (OST) programs in the past two decades (Larson, Walker, & Pearce, 2005; Zeldin, Christens, & Powers, 2013). The Y-AP model is defined as "the practice of (a) multiple youth and multiple…

This report analyzes case studies of "more and better learning time" efforts around the country. With support from the Ford Foundation, America's Promise Alliance looked in Grand Rapids, MI; Louisville, KY; Memphis, TN; and Rochester, NY to see how time spent out of the classroom improved outcomes for students in low-income neighborhoods…

Background: Key findings from the literature on treatment interventions with youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) indicate that the most successful approaches allow frequent opportunities for uncontrived social interactions and are customizable to the needs of individuals and the group. Adventure therapy meets these criteria while providing…

Black feminist scholars have produced compelling frameworks for assessing direct speech behavior, both within and external to Black female speech communities. These frameworks are marginalized in mainstream organizational psychology and educational psychology research on psychological safety. Psychological safety is a concept that positions…

TechXcite is an engineering-focused, discovery-based after-school science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) program. The free curriculum is downloadable from http://techxcite.pratt.duke.edu/ and is comprised of eight Modules, each with four to five 45-minute activities that exercise the science and math learned in school by using…

One of the central tenets of the neoliberal world view is that there is no alternative to market-based societies with their focus on competition, individualism, and the abandonment of social safety nets and environmental protections. This vision has become the new common sense. As neoliberal policies and practices have spread across the planet,…