The Afterschool Alliance, in partnership with MetLife Foundation, is proud to present the final issue brief in their latest series of four issue briefs examining critical issues facing middle school youth and the vital role afterschool programs play in addressing these issues. This brief explores afterschool and data utilization to improve…

In recent years, attention has been given to the academic impact of afterschool programs. Some schools collaborate with afterschool programs in an attempt to align the learning that occurs during the school day with the learning that occurs during afterschool hours, and thus maximize the potential to positively impact student academic achievement.…

This study analyzed the relationship between after-school programs and standardized assessment results of schools in Texas. Information was collected from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) website including Academic Excellence Indicator System (AEIS) reports and after-school grantees. The independent variables were after-school 21st Century…

Problem Statement: Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education aims at improving students' knowledge and skills in science and math, and thus their attitudes and career choices in these areas. The ultimate goal in STEM education is to create scientifically literate individuals who can survive in the global economy. The…

Digital games have become popular for engaging students in a range of learning goals, both in the classroom and the after-school space. In this article, I discuss a specific genre of video game, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMO), which has been identified as a dynamic environment for encountering 21st-century workplace…

This study was designed to reveal the attitudes of music teachers toward parents' involvement. The 13 participants were active music teachers who taught one-on-one lessons in an afterschool program. The participants were interviewed in accordance with the question research protocol designed for this study. Although most of the teachers were in…

High-potential students from low-income families are at an academic disadvantage compared with their more affluent peers. To address this issue, researchers have suggested novel approaches to mitigate gaps in student performance, including out-of-school enrichment programs. Longitudinal mixed effects modeling was used to analyze the growth of…

This article reflects upon an investigative study of the powerful impact that mentoring partnerships have on pre-college students and young engineering professionals in Hartford, CT. It was found that these partnerships can provide very strong foundations for a diverse pre-college student engineering pipeline that includes significant numbers of…

Challenge the Gap (CtG) is a school collaboration programme designed by Challenge Partners that aims to break the link between disadvantage and attainment. The main components of CtG are: (1) after-school workshops drawing on published research and evidenced practice; (2) focused in-school interventions with a selected cohort of disadvantaged…

The Roadmap of Need is an in-depth needs assessment for North Carolina youth, produced annually by the Public School Forum of North Carolina's Center for Afterschool Programs (NC CAP). This publication examines 20 indicators of wellness in counties across North Carolina. These indicators contain relevant annual data demonstrating need across North…

The proliferation of new technologies has changed the way we live, learn, and work. The vision of the future includes a new machine age, where various technologies (sensors, communication, computation, and intelligence) will be embedded around, on, and in us; where humans will shape technology and technology will shape human interaction; and where…

This manuscript, written with the educator in mind, describes the Youth Historians in Harlem (YHH) program, a twenty-week after-school history program that engaged urban students in history by immersing them in aspects of the historical process. Throughout the program, a group of Black male high school students were apprenticed as historical…

The Afterschool Alliance, in partnership with Dollar General Literacy Foundation, is proud to present this issue brief examining the vital role afterschool programs play in building students' literacy skills. This issue brief will focus on the year-round support needed to help students with their reading, writing and critical thinking skills. This…

Recent years have seen a growing interest in intelligent game-based learning environments featuring virtual agents. A key challenge posed by incorporating virtual agents in game-based learning environments is dynamically determining the dialogue moves they should make in order to best support students' problem solving. This paper presents a…

This study examines the effectiveness of minimally trained tutors providing a highly structured tutoring intervention for struggling readers. We screened students in Grades K-6 for participation in an after-school tutoring program. We randomly assigned those students not meeting the benchmark on a reading screening measure to either a tutoring…