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Fall 2022 Evolving the Standard for High Quality

In the prior two blogs, we talked about how a group of master afterschool teachers at 25 afterschool sites in Genesee County have responded to the pandemic years. One important area of evolution was the new service models that put staff in the field visiting homes and meeting parents at drop off sites, producing a wide variety of online activity content, taking activities outside and, for the first time, implementing a whole new regime of

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The State of Children in Afterschool

Like all managers I interviewed last fall, Keoshia, site manager for YouthQuest at Durant-Tuuri-Mott Elementary School, agreed that over 50% of this year’s students were behind academically. For that reason, the team at DTM Elementary afterschool is focused on math and literacy. However, for Keoshia and her team at DTM, the children’s socio-emotional skills are about the same as usual. This year was about picking up where last year left off in terms of socio-emotional

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Afterschool Excellence During Pandemic Years

The field of afterschool program services has evolved quickly since March 2020, from the pressing of resources at hand into responses to urgent new needs. These new practices may spell out the future of afterschool services and new roles for afterschool teachers. 

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How could OST address climate change?

With the publication of the IPCC report, it’s not difficult to conclude that our current political leadership is not going to take us where we need to go, and we can’t wait anymore. The scientists are telling us right now, in clear language, that the time is up: Major transformations in our thinking and behavior around energy use must happen right now.

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How the Q-ODM impact model is a more cost-effective form of the quasi-experimental design (QED)

Our approach to program evaluation increases the usefulness of all estimates produced as part of an impact analysis. We replace the “no-treatment” counterfactual condition (i.e., children who were not exposed to an afterschool program) with low-implementation conditions (e.g., children who were exposed to lower-quality practices) in order to describe the impact of optimal implementation on child outcomes.

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Why are Q-ODM’s Pattern-Centered Methods (PCM) More Realistic and Useful for Evaluators?

Pattern-centered theory and methods (PCM) can be used to tell simple and accurate stories about how real persons grow in real school and afterschool classrooms. Stories about the quality and outcomes (i.e., causes and effects) that are modeled using PCM are particularly useful because they can address questions related to “how” programs and classrooms work and “how much” children grow skills.

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