Out-of-School Time (OST) programs play a crucial role in child and youth development, serving as a bridge between school, home, and the community. They offer structured environments where young people can engage in meaningful activities, build relationships, and develop essential life skills. OST programs foster personal growth, academic support,…

Young people need digital competency and confidence to effectively harness computing power to solve problems and design solutions; a core component is improving young people's computational thinking. Unfortunately, access to computer science education is lacking for all youth, and in particular for youth who live in lower-income households, who…

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has administered the federally-funded Nita M. Lowey 21st Century Community Learning Center (21st CCLC) grant program, also known as Title IV, Part B, of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) since 2002. The purpose of the program is to create community learning centers that provide students with…

In Türkiye, Science and Art Centers (SACs) are the institutions where gifted students receive the most education. The aim of this research is to gather opinions and experiences related to various aspects of SAC, including identification, educational programs, problems, advantages and disadvantages, teachers, family approach, and benefits of being…

Since 2002, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has administered the federally-funded Nita M. Lowey 21st Century Community Learning Center (21st CCLC) grant program, also known as Title IV, Part B, of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The purpose of the program is to create community learning centers that provide students…

Unsafe and violent schools are a widespread problem in South Africa. This paper argues that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) contribute to this phenomenon. While various individual and community-level interventions to address ACEs have been reported on, the contribution of safe parks towards preventing school violence has not yet been…

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened an ad-hoc committee to examine learning and development in out-of-school time settings across the K-12 age span. To inform its deliberations, the committee held three public sessions, on October 19, 2023, February 8, 2024, and April 18, 2024. This publication summarizes the…

The purpose of this quantitative comparative study was to determine the differences in literacy and mathematics pass rates between AY 2021-2022 and AY 2022-2023, whether a 21st CCLC Program contributed to score differences and whether there is an interaction between them in a southeastern state. A two-way mixed ANOVA was used to answer the…

Cleveland came into the pandemic with a history of collaboration among civic organizations and schools. In summer 2020, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) and partners--community organizations, funders, and out-of-school-time organizations--saw that students were in a crisis and came together to establish full-day remote-learning…

Tutoring--defined here as one-on-one or small-group instructional programming by teachers, paraprofessionals, volunteers, or parents--is one of the most versatile and potentially transformative educational tools in use today. Within the past decade, dozens of preK-12 tutoring experiments have been conducted, varying widely in their approach,…

The 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) program, funded through the U.S. Department of Education, provides academic enrichment opportunities outside of the regular school day to help students meet state and local performance standards in core academic subjects, such as reading and math. This report summarizes the 2019-2020…

We recommend the conceptualization of computing as a critical literacy, and ground this conceptualization in considerations of historical and current realities in computing. The frameworks of connected learning and computational participation are recommended as guides for "doing" critical computing literacy. We present the findings from…

The purpose of this study was to examine the benefits, challenges, and limitations of a service-learning project designed to promote responsiveness among PK-12 preservice teachers (N=41). The service-learning included working with children (5- to 12-year-olds) at before- and after-school programs, interviewing site staff, and developing lesson…

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, children, families, and educators faced unprecedented challenges that disproportionally impacted racially/ethnically diverse, low-income communities due to long-standing health system, socioeconomic, and educational inequities. With closures of schools, libraries, and child-care centers, many children were disconnected…

As part of the program evaluation under the newly revised "Texas State Plan for the Education of Gifted/Talented Students" (Texas Education Agency, 2019), the Department of Research and Accountability conducted surveys of students, teachers, and parents to establish a baseline about perceptions of the G/T Program and collect formative…