Research supports the use of engaging young students in shared reading opportunities beyond the school setting to scaffold children's social emotional and academic development. This article describes an exploratory mixed-methods case study examining the application of the Storybooks and Social Hooks (SASH) curriculum, which uses dialogic reading…

Purpose: Grounded in occupational socialization theory, the purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of mentoring underserved youth on the socialization of preservice teachers within a community-engaged after-school program. Methods: Data consisted of semistructured interviews, critical incident accounts, and field notes. All…

Purpose: The teaching personal and social responsibility model has been incorporated into out of school time programming globally, but there is limited research focused on how practitioners learn to use the model. Guided by occupational socialization theory, the authors used self-study to understand the experiences of a doctoral student as she…

Jon's Heroes in Training (JHT) represents a strong cross-sector collaboration that was created and has evolved over the past five years. JHT is an after-school program where children (ages 3-22) with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis come to the local university to engage in high-quality physical education lessons designed and…

The Joint Educational Project's (JEP) STEM Education Programs at the University of Southern California (USC) present an elementary-level curriculum centered on the science of stem cells in partnership with Dr. Adam MacLean, an Assistant Professor of Quantitative and Computational Biology at USC for the broader impacts of a National Science…

Background: Real-world problems are important in math instruction, but they do not necessarily trigger students' task motivation. Personalizing real-world problems by (1) matching problems to students' shared living environment (context personalization) and (2) asking students to pose their own problems (active personalization) might be two…

Using a statewide sample of participants in 4-H programs, we tested associations among youth sparks, program quality, program dosage, and four types of involvement (breadth of participation in out-of-school-time beyond 4-H, scope of learning strategies, degree of specialization, and cumulative program immersion). Participants were 180 Texas 4-H…

In this article, I use narrative portraiture as a methodology to inquire into the ways that two Asian American (AsAm) girls used their time in an after-school writing collaborative for girls of Color to explore and express their identities and political commitments through multiple literacies. Building on theoretical foundations of AsianCrit,…

Afterschool programs are increasingly recognized as valuable opportunities for learning that can create social capital, expose students to topics of interest, and build personal identities. Yet poor policies and ineffective practices driven by outdated ideals abound, including an emphasis on the caregiving function of afterschool programs for…

Purpose: The purposes of this study were to describe the roles mentors enacted as part of an afterschool science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) program and how those roles varied across three sites and to explain those differences. Design/methodology/approach: The authors used a comparative case study design and collected data…

The study aims to contribute to knowledge of children's views on their space to fend for themselves at a time in their lives when they face change and decreased institutional care, i.e. in the transition from organized to unorganized after-school activities. The study builds on interviews with 22 children who are about to leave or change…

Many elementary school students require and may benefit from supplemental reading support and interventions that can be provided by afterschool programs. The problem addressed in this study was that it was not known if third grade students benefited from an afterschool reading program in one East Tennessee District. The purpose of this…

The problem in the 21st Century Community Learning Center (CCLC) afterschool program was that 40% of the students enrolled performed below the proficiency level in reading on the state assessed exams during the past 3 school years. This was of great concern for the teachers and administrators in this Title I middle school, Grades 6-8. This…

There is an increasing demand for change in mathematics education to combat deficit-based assumptions towards students of color and promote culturally affirming learning environments (Celedon-Pattichis et al., 2018). Equity-centered mathematics research provides a powerful opportunity to resist these deficit constructions towards marginalized…

Human interactions across settings shape young people's learning and development, and building adult expertise in facilitating productive interactions takes deliberate practice and reflective experience. However, relational practices are not consistently part of adult learning for those who work with youth. We describe a 2-year design study to…