ENGAGING ADOLESCENTS IN OUT-OF-SCHOOL TIME (OST) PROGRAMS: LEARNING WHAT WORKS

A Forum — October 7, 2005

Background

Research suggests a correlation between higher levels of attendance in out-of-school time activities and positive outcomes for adolescents. The benefits can include scholastic achievement, higher school attendance, more time spent on homework and extracurricular activities, enjoyment of effort in school, better teacher reports of student behavior, and a smoother transition to high school, jobs, or college.

Among older youth, the most common barriers to sustained participation in OST programs include the student’s desire to relax and hang out with friends, work, chores and sibling care, boredom or disinterest, and problems with transportation or safety.

Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP) has identified 10 strategies that improve recruitment and retention of adolescents in structured OST activities.

Participants from Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP) and Citizen Schools discussed evidence-supported ways to overcome low rates of participation and persistence by middle school students in out-of-school programs.

“Participation matters,” said Priscilla Little, associate director of HFRP and project manager of its Out-Of-School Time Learning and Development Initiative.  HFRP’s review of research showed that the positive outcomes of structured OST activities can include academic, cognitive, social/emotional, and physical health benefits and development of such 21st century workplace skills as building relationships and sustained engagement in tasks.

“But participation is lower than we would like,” Little added. A national study of 21st Century Community Learning Centers found that, while participation averages nearly two days per week for elementary students, it drops to just under one day per week for middle school students. Citing two well-respected OST programs, Little said that youth on average participate one to two days per week in San Francisco Beacons and 1.2 to 2.4 days per week at Extended Services Schools. While Little supported efforts to increase those rates, she also raised the issue that expectations for participation need to be based on developmental periods, with expectations for regular daily attendance being greater for elementary school children than for middle and high school-age youth, who may be engaged in a variety of out-of-school time activities in addition to attending an after-school program.

Little shared the latest findings from HFRP’s new study on contextual predictors of participation in OST activities.  Early analyses reveal that family income and parental education, which often overlap, also correlate with participation in many kinds of OST activities. “With the exception of tutoring programs, virtually all types of OST participation reveal a general pattern of higher participation among youth with higher family incomes and education, ranging from sports to faith-based or extracurricular activities to after school,” Little said.  Further, Hispanic youth and, to a lesser extent, African American youth are less likely than white youth to participate in a variety of OST contexts.  In some cases, however, African America youth are more likely than white youth to enter OST programs, such as summer camps and after-school programs.  Once enrolled, however, they tend to participate with less intensity. (For more information on this study visit: www.gse.harvard.edu/hfrp/projects/ost_participation.html.)

Based on a review of OST evaluations, the most common reasons given by youth for nonparticipation were a preference for relaxing informally with friends, a need or desire to do paid work, family responsibilities, lack of interest, and concerns about safety at a site or traveling to or from it.

Funding shortages also limit participation, Little said. According to the Afterschool Alliance data in 2002, only one-fourth of applications for 21st Century Learning Center grants could be filled at current levels of appropriations. She said another factor linked with low participation is parents’ and youth’s perceptions of the lack of high quality programs available in their communities.

Sherri Lauver, HFRP consultant and assistant professor at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, University of Rochester, said she and Little identified 10 evidence-supported strategies for improving recruitment and retention:

• Remind youth of how specific elements of the program help them prepare for a brighter future.
• Tell parents about their child’s opportunity to get homework help and tutoring, establish new friendships, and gain access to such benefits as exposure to the arts, or the chance to be physically active.
• Rather than relying solely on posters and flyers, recruit and follow up person-to-person, using phone calls, street outreach, and visits to homes and schools.
• Recruit in peer circles, with participants bringing in friends.
• Make extra efforts to recruit some at-risk youth, who aren’t involved in any OST program and may even be in trouble in school.
• Involve older youth in deciding how to match program content and schedules to teens’ desires. The results could include offering a choice among many activities, extending hours, and rolling admissions rather than sign-up periods linked to the school year.
• Set explicit, transparent expectations for attendance and follow up personally if youth do not show up.
• Do not replicate the school day; instead, complement it with leisure activities that balance content-based learning with a mix of physical activity, recreation, structured and unstructured activities, mastery orientation, and opportunities for autonomy, choice, and leadership.
• Consider whether the program’s resources allow offering incentives, such as paid apprenticeships, stipends, and point or reward systems.
• Provide opportunities for leadership, community service, and paid employment, including activities that could lead to travel to new places, including conventions or contests. Useful approaches include job clubs, job searches, service learning, and paid internships in the program.

Stephanie Davolos Harden, regional director for Massachusetts at Citizen Schools, said the research aligns with her real-world experiences, which include serving as Director of Apprenticeships for the non-profit OST provider from 1996-2003.

Citizen Schools created and operates a national network that connects 2,000 students at sites on 24 middle school campuses in five states with 1,500 adult volunteers in hands-on learning activities. The best known of its authentic learning activities, called “apprenticeships,” take place at sites ranging from law and architecture offices to museums, where volunteers guide small groups of youth in several weeks of preparation for public demonstrations known as “Wows!” Some recent Wows! featured students arguing at mock trials before federal judges, testifying at planning hearings, publishing newspapers or designing websites for their schools, and competing in a fictional version of “Jeopardy!”

Comparison of the participants at some Citizen Schools sites in Boston with matched sets of nonparticipants showed that the program’s sixth graders performed better in four of seven school-related indicators of success and that its eighth graders did better in two measures related to high school completion: choosing to enroll in a top-tier high school under Boston’s public school choice system, and being promoted to Grade 10 on time. Harden reported on lessons learned about how to best engage and enroll young adolescents in after-school programming by Citizen Schools since its start in 1995:

• Highly trained and engaged staff are critical to building relationships with students, teachers, volunteers, and parents.
• The full-time site director, who is school based, must be able to work with educators and be perceived as “cool” by adolescents.
• Quality programming that excites and motivates students through choice, hands-on learning, access to real world opportunities, and a safe and nurturing peer group keeps young people engaged.
• Eighth graders and sixth graders need different programs.
• Program alumni make good interns.
• Strong student partnerships that allow frontline after-school staff to be aware of school-day struggles and teachers’ needs help to shift academic outcomes for young people and foster a belief in what is possible.

Staff turnover in OST programs, which typically offer only part-time work at less than $15 an hour and require charismatic leadership of skeptical teens, is “a huge problem, which Citizen Schools works hard to address through building pipelines for staff members and offering unique incentives, like professional development and credentialing,” Harden said.

Citizen Schools hires a full-time director for each campus. In Massachusetts, Citizen Schools also increases OST professionalism and maintains its ratio of one staff member for every 12 youth through the Citizen Schools National Teaching Fellowship Program― a unique partnership-based model that obtains two-year commitments from AmeriCorps teaching fellows by offering them an opportunity to study for a master’s degree in education with a focus on OST education leadership from Lesley University in Cambridge, while working mornings in other programs and afternoons at Citizen Schools sites.

As the forum panelists fielded questions from other participants, Harden confirmed that OST programs for older youth are costlier than those for elementary school children. Her program aims to serve 84 to 100 participants at each site, which would put the cost at $2,000 to $2,500 a year per participant. The average site has between 60 and 65 participants this year.

In response to a question about reasonable outcomes related to participation in after-school programs, Little responded that there is no consensus on the purposes for and outcomes of after-school programs.  The after-school stakeholder community, including researchers, varies in its expectations regarding outcomes.  In addition to imparting skills that are taught explicitly, such as music, teamwork, or how to apply for a job, it is debatable whether or not OST programs can be held accountable for improving the general academic performance of participants. Lauver said some research tools, such as self-esteem or motivational inventories, might show that the programs meet other highly-valued youth development goals.

In addition, Harden offered, quality OST programs are preventative in nature by providing trained staff who create programs that offer safe havens from drugs and violence. However, researchers Little and Lauver said that the fiscal and contextual realities of many OST programs are such that they do not have the resources or capacity to provide the training necessary to achieve the outcomes that many programs strive to attain.  The OST workforce, comprised of a wide variety of trained professionals, college students, and volunteers, renders any kind of uniform training challenging.  In an ideal world, adults who work with young people would understand basic tenets of youth development, but this is not the reality in many OST programs.

Presenter Bios

Stephanie Davolos Harden is a founding member of the Citizen Schools leadership team and has been on staff at Citizen Schools since 1996.  As regional director for Massachusetts at Citizen Schools, Harden is responsible for creating affiliate partnerships with community-based organizations in communities across Massachusetts and is currently running Citizen Schools programs in public schools in Framingham, Lowell, Malden, New Bedford, Springfield, and Worcester.  In addition, she coaches and trains senior managers, principals, school district officials and program staff who run the Citizen Schools programs in these communities.

Harden served as director of apprenticeships at Citizen Schools from 1996-2003, developing and implementing the program's recruitment, training and support strategies for the hundreds of corporate and community volunteer Citizen Teachers who work with the program each year.  Prior to joining the Citizen Schools team, she worked for four and a half years as both a teacher and regional Director for the Teach For America program.  At Teach For America, Harden taught fourth, fifth and sixth grade French at La Rose Middle School in a rural South Louisiana School system.  She then went on to become the program's regional director for the South Louisiana Region, working with over 100 first through sixth-year teachers in both urban and rural districts and managing fund, program, and board development.  She is a 1991 graduate of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and completed a Master’s degree at Harvard's Graduate School of Education in 1999.  Stephanie lives in Hubbardston, Massachusetts with her husband and three year-old daughter Eleanor.

Sherri Lauver is an assistant professor in program evaluation methods and associate director of the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development at the University of Rochester. She also serves as the evaluator on numerous grant and contract projects and specializes in experimental and quasi-experimental research designs.

Prior to her appointment at the Warner Center, Lauver served as a research associate and project officer for the Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Educational Evaluation, at the U.S. Department of Education, where she oversaw a $5 million national study of supplemental literacy interventions for struggling ninth grade readers. At the University of Pennsylvania, Lauver served as a project manager and co-principal investigator on a grant funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation to evaluate the benefits of extended-day programming for at-risk middle school youth using a mixed-method evaluation design. Other experiences include serving as a research coordinator at the University of Pennsylvania and as administrator and youth worker in an after school program.

Lauver has co-authored articles on after-school projects that appear in such journals as New Directions for Youth Development, Prevention Researcher, The School Administrator, and The Evaluation Exchange. She has consulted with the Harvard Family Research Project for the past three years.

Priscilla Little, associate director of Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP), provides intellectual and administrative leadership to HFRP. This includes managing and coordinating current research activities, participating in resource development and outreach to current and prospective funders, developing and coordinating relationships with national organizations, providing intellectual support to projects to facilitate cross-project synergy and management of priorities, and coordinating activities to ensure long-term performance and sustainability for HFRP.

She is also project manager for HFRP's Out-of-School Time (OST) Learning and Development Initiative focused on building the field of out-of-school time through the timely development and dissemination of quality evaluation information and tools. The cornerstone of this work is the development of an online searchable database of out-of-school time program evaluation profiles. Additionally, she serves on the advisory board for the Southwest Educational Development Lab's National Partnership for Quality Afterschool Learning, as well as state after school boards, and is a national expert on research and evaluation of out-of-school time programs and how they can complement in-school learning and development. Little also provides research support to the HFRP team currently evaluating a universal Pre-K initiative in California.

Little’s research interests include the evaluation of programs and policies to promote quality out-of-school time experiences for children, early care and education, family involvement, and program evaluation. She received her undergraduate degree from Smith College in 1981 and her Master's of Child Study from Tufts University in 1990, where she continued with doctoral studies in the same department through 1992. Priscilla lives in Medford, Massachusetts, with her husband and three daughters.

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