This article provides results from a survey of instructors who have offered the National Safe Tractor and Machinery Operation Program (NSTMOP) to youth planning to work in agriculture. Youth younger than age 16 who wish to be employed on non-family farms are required to complete an approved safety training program to operate tractors and other…

Objectives: Drug education is delivered by a broad spectrum of multi-disciplinary practitioners within the fields of health promotion, drug prevention and treatment, social care, and community and youth work. However, drug education is often misunderstood or conflated with drug information and/or drug prevention. This ambiguity of understanding is…

What is credible and actionable evidence can vary by program discipline in the Cooperative Extension Service. Through a series of interviews with program leadership from Agriculture, Natural Resources, Youth Development, Family Development, and Community Vitality, a case study of one state's Extension system is described. While programs certainly…

The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly impacted teaching and learning in K-12 settings, as many public schools lacked the technological tools and techniques needed to support effective virtual meetings and online learning. In this article, we explore the impact of the pandemic on "Youth Built Change" (YBC), a STEM-pipeline partnership between…

People in industrialized countries may be losing their connection with nature. The Get to Know Program (Get to Know) is a multi-faceted program aimed at encouraging direct connection with nature through a variety of activities (observations of wildlife, hiking, creative arts, and special events), specifically among youth. Three studies assessed…

In this manuscript, I interrogate the concept of "quality" encounter programs for youth in conflict zones. I focus on two Israeli organizations implementing encounters for Jewish and Palestinian citizens, and draw upon narratives of former participants as articulated during life history narratives to illustrate divergent emphases in each…

The term "social-emotional learning" (SEL), defined by the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) as "a process for helping children develop the fundamental skills for life effectiveness," is a current buzzword in education, highlighting the important role that both practitioners and researchers…

This article discusses a qualitative evaluation of the Florida 4-H Health Rocks! program aimed at youth alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use prevention. A questionnaire was distributed to Extension professionals across Florida to gain insight into the strengths and barriers they faced with programming. Programmatic strengths included targeting a…

Even as service-learning has become more prevalent in higher education as a high-impact teaching methodology, barriers still exist to its implementation by some instructors. One concern is the perception of these types of activities infringing upon course content. This article outlines an example of an introductory service-learning project for an…

This article examined the literature on best practices in content-specific professional development and then aligns this work with the practices of a citywide afterschool chess program run by After School Activities Partnerships (ASAP) in Philadelphia. School teachers, out-of-school time (OST) staff, and youth workers readied themselves to think…

This article reports results of an analysis of the relationship of young people in school, and their individual and group attitudes based on sociometric theory. This study adopted a mixed methodological approach with an intervention conducted with 60 youths over 3 years in Portugal and was based on the question "Is sociometry capable of…

Over the past decade, there has been greater attention placed on the potential value of peer support models, particularly in school contexts. This paper uses the case study of an Irish school-based peer mentoring programme to identify the added value that peer led models of social support for children and young people offer in a school setting.…

There are only a few process evaluation studies on positive youth development programs, particularly in the Chinese context. Objectives: This study aims to examine the quality of implementation of a positive youth development program (Project Positive Adolescent Training through Holistic Social Programs [P.A.T.H.S.]) and investigate the…

The Auckland City Council arts team has managed several successful youth arts projects across the city of Auckland. The council aims to establish a best-practice standard for community artists in line with international standards of community cultural development. This reflective paper explores the processes, impacts and outcomes of some of the…

The FESNOJIV (the Spanish acronym for the State Foundation for the National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras), more commonly known as "El Sistema," teaches 300,000 of Venezuela's poorest children in the nationwide music learning program. Many begin attending the "nucleo" as early as age two or three, and the vast…