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The original validation study for the Youth Program Quality Assessment (Youth PQA). The Youth PQA was developed to assess the quality of instruction in afterschool and other education settings.

Overall 24 sites within 17 grantees participated in the self-assessment pilot study by assembling staff teams to collect data and score the Youth Program Quality Assessment (PQA). Youth PQA data collected using the self-assessment method demonstrated promising patterns of both internal consistency and concurrent validity with aligned youth survey responses.

Design theory and formative evidence to describe setting dynamics at two distinct levels, (1) the organization-level where professional learning communities are formed and (2) point-of-service level (e.g., classrooms) where professional staff and learners meet.

A presentation of baseline and post-pilot program quality ratings for 38 after school programs participating in a pilot quality improvement system in Palm Beach County, Florida.

This chapter describes the Youth Program Quality Intervention (YPQI), a setting-level intervention model designed to raise quality in out-of-school time programs. The YPQI takes managers and staff from a network of youth programs through a process of identifying and addressing strengths and areas for improvement, using a standardized assessment tool.

This paper, published in the Fall 2008 edition of Afterschool Matters: Occasional Paper Series, describes community partnerships in Michigan’s 21st CCLC programs.

This paper uses pattern centered methods to describe the association between the quality of instruction available and youth’s level of mental engagement with that instruction.

In the fragmented OST sector, defining and measuring quality in terms of staff behaviors provides a common framework that can reduce obstacles to performance improvement and streamline data-driven accountability. This chapter views the point of service as the critical unit of study because it is ubiquitous across OST programs and because it is the place where key developmental experiences are intentionally delivered.

This paper uses pattern centered methods to describe the association between the quality of instruction available and youth’s level of mental engagement with that instruction.

This paper uses pattern centered methods to identify three different quality profiles (high, medium, and low) that characterize staff instruction in out-of-school time programs.