Tag: pattern-centered analysis

Impact Evaluation for the Palm Beach County Quality Improvement System 

Quality Improvement System (QIS) exposure moves afterschool programs to higher quality, increasing access to developmentally powerful settings and building children’s social and emotional learning skills. Higher quality is defined in terms of the quality of instruction (i.e., individuation, basic/advanced SEL, enrichment content), the stability of staff tenure, and evidence of children’s SEL skill growth.

In this study, we used performance data generated by Prime Time Inc. in Palm Beach County and fully pattern-centered methodology to describe the chain of causal effects as a cascade of sequential impacts. 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?

Findings demonstrate that (1) QIS exposure causes program quality improvement to occur and (2) exposure to high quality corresponds to SEL skill growth. Specifically, (1.a) quality increased dramatically over three years of exposure to the Palm Beach County QIS; (1.b) programs with Low Quality at QIS entry improved when exposed to even moderate QIS Fidelity; (2.a.) children exposed to higher-quality programs had greater SEL skill maintenance and gains compared to children exposed to lower-quality programs; and (2.b) children with Low SEL Skill at entry made greater gains at all levels of program quality.

This pattern of findings suggests that the Prime Time QIS design is successfully building the quality of services available in the county in substantively meaningful ways – by increasing the quality of instruction, increasing the tenure of staff, and growing SEL skills for students who need it most.

Parent Practice Quality

QTurn’s Multilevel Person-in-Context ~neuroperson (MPCn) model was used to select PACT items corresponding to four different kinds of parenting practices that promote children’s SEL skill growth. As described in the document in more detail, we use the terms Warmth, Responsivity, Scaffolding, and Attention because they reflect the core aspects of parenting practice necessary for calibrating socialization environments to the current skill levels of participating children. Although the basic idea is that parenting practices that combine moderate difficulty, positive affect, adult modeling, and co-participation in the learning task promote child engagement in the learning process, hence SEL skill development and integration.

Linking after-school instructional practices to youth engagement: A pattern-centered approach

Youth participation in after-school settings has been linked to numerous positive outcomes but this is inconsistent across studies. Two necessary ingredients for this link are proposed: appropriate instructional practices and youth engagement. Both are profiled user cluster analysis in a dataset including observations of staff instructional practices in 151 youth program offerings and 1176 surveys from youth attending these offerings. Instructional practice profiles suggest patterns corresponding to positive youth development (PYD), staff-centered (SC), and low quality. Youth engagement profiles range from low to medium to high, and further vary across perceived learning and voice. Cross-tabulations reveal strong positive links between PYD and high engagement and between low-quality and low engagement; and strong negative links between PYD and low engagement and between low-quality and high engagement.