OVERVIEW
Compassionate, Data-Driven Support for Youth Programs
QTurn is dedicated to helping programs unlock children’s full potential. We empower local managers to address real problems using their own instincts and expertise. With the right supports, out-of-school time programs can improve the lives of children and youth. High-quality programs strengthen social skills, foster resilience, improve academic achievement, and promote health and well-being.
Our services include compassionate coaching, user-friendly measurement, customized evaluation, agile analytics, and tailored supports. These time-tested interventions are sensitive to the needs of each program. Despite the impact of the pandemic and other strains on our system, QTurn can equip staff with the strategies and supports needed to become guiding lights for the next generation.
USER-FRIENDLY SOLUTIONS
Do-It-Yourself Measures:
Holistic Child Skills and Adult Best Practices
QTurn’s DIY measures provide low-cost, trainable tools that yield useful raw data. Our measures help you design your own studies, collect your own data, and prepare it for continuous improvement entirely in-house. Our tools include:
Management
Assess program management practices
Instruction
Observe and assess trauma-informed practices
Children
Observe and assess children’s social and emotional skills
Adults
Assess the social and emotional wellbeing of adults
Benefits of Our Measures
Our measures draw upon our Neuroperson framework, a blueprint for understanding socio-emotional skills as three aspects of mental functioning: schemas, beliefs, and awareness. This framework, firmly rooted in leading-edge research, is especially useful for understanding SEL skills in children exposed to adverse childhood experiences.
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FEATURED SERVICE
Compassionate Coaching:
Strengths-Based Feedback for Programs with High ACEs Exposure
QTurn’s Compassionate Coaching centers on empowering site leaders with meaningful evaluative information. This approach contrasts with traditional centralized evaluation models, focusing instead on local insights and strengths-based feedback.
QTurn’s Compassionate Coaching uses specific types of data, including item-level information from our suite of measures, to support strengths-based feedback. This method helps local coaches make informed decisions and drive continuous improvement in OST programs.
POWERFUL METHODS
Agile Analytics:
Describing Program Impacts and Equity Effects
QTurn’s Agile Analytics uses the Quality-Outcomes (Q-O) Toolbox for Impact Evaluation to provide robust modeling of impacts. This method is designed to overcome typical OST data challenges and produce useful information about adult practices and children’s responses.
See It In Action
We sought to answer two specific questions about implementation and children’s SEL skill growth: What is the impact of QIS exposure on program quality (i.e., best practices, low staff turnover, great content), particularly for programs that have lower program quality at baseline? What is the impact of exposure to high program quality on student SEL skills?
The Quality-Impact-Equity Design and Methods (QDM) Toolbox was used to: (a) reconfigure existing measures for Parenting Practice Quality and Child SEL Skill to maximize reliability and validity for measuring socio-emotional skills and learning (SEL); (b) produce holistic profiles of parent and child skill at each timepoint; and (c) apply pattern-centered analytics to estimate impact and equity effects of the PC+
program as implemented in Newark.
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.