After-school programs provide a wide variety of opportunities to elementary, middle and high school students. Since the early 1990's, policymakers have started seeing these programs as important vehicles for helping disadvantaged youth. To investigate what effects these programs in fact have we have conducted a number of evaluations with other researchers on a range of school- and community-based after-school programs. We have addressed questions such as: What kinds of experiences do young people have in after-school programs? How are high quality programs implemented? And what effects do after-school programs have on young people’s academic and social behaviors? Below are descriptions of some of the on-going studies, while the articles and reports from completed studies are available on our youth policy publication page.
Dr. Grossman is a senior member the evaluation team with researchers from P/PV, MDRC and Bloom Associates responsible for assessing the effectiveness of specially tailored after-school academic curricula developed for this demonstration. This $13 million multi-organizational U.S. Department of Education project involves conducting two parallel random assignment evaluations (each with 1,000 sample members) of the reading and math curricula, testing the impacts on key student outcomes, especially on academic achievement.
In this study, Dr. Grossman and colleagues at P/PV are investigating what makes a high quality after-school program. Using observation, staff questionnaires and student surveys, the team is examining what staff and program practices promote engagement and learning in the students. A critical question that will be addressed is whether the staff practices of high quality academic activities differ from those of high quality non-academic activities.