Over the past three years, hundreds of community-based afterschool comic book clubs have been launched in cities across the United States. These clubs have drawn in thousands of underserved youths in grades 1–12. In these clubs, children plan, write, sketch, design, and produce original comic books and then publish and distribute their works for other children in the community to use as learning and motivational tools. This synthetic and analytic research project explores the dynamics, outcomes, and impacts of afterschool comic book clubs.
This article describes the "In Addition" afterschool mathematics program and the pressures it faced due to standardized testing and homework. In addition aims to go beyond worksheets and drills to engage student's curiosity and help show them that mathematics is relevant to their lives outside the classroom.
Practitioner research fellowships help transform out-of-school-time practitioners from consumers of others’ research to makers of knowledge based on their own experience and practices.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Sarah HillSusan Matloff-NievesLena Townsend
This article from Afterschool Matters explores the challenge of engaging boys in writing. Loeper examines the difference between "engagement" and "flow", providing generalizable lessons for fostering engagement in out of school time activities.
Research on middle school participants’ engagement in afterschool programs shows that such programs often serve as developmental contexts for promoting “flow” experiences. Compared to when they are in other settings after school, participants in afterschool programs are more likely to experience high concentrated effort and intrinsic motivation, experiences consistent with Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow. Organized sports, arts enrichment, and academic enrichment activities were found to be particularly engaging program activities, in contrast to homework completion. The importance of high
Social network analysis of a local afterschool ecosystem in Dallas County, Texas, reveals programs’ relative isolation from one another and their dependence on just a few funding sources. Considerable opportunity exists for programs to collaborate to build a more cohesive system of afterschool programming.
This document describes the Dimensions of Success (DoS), an assessment tool created by researchers at the Program in Education, Afterschool, and Resiliency (PEAR). DoS was created to help out-of-school time programs and researchers monitor and measure quality. It allows observers to collect systemic data along 12 quality indicators to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of afterschool science learning experiences.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Anahit PapazianAshima ShahCaitlin Rufo-McCormick
While much of the current concern over the literacy development of low- and moderate income children focuses on schools (and, to a lesser degree, on parents), many observers are arguing for a role for other institutions. In particular, funders are turning to afterschool programs to address this critical developmental task. This paper explores the roles afterschool programs can and do play in the literacy development of low-income children, drawing on surveys and observations of afterschool programs in Chicago, New York, and Seattle.
The ability to set and work toward goals is not inborn. This study examines how an afterschool program worked to help elementary-age children learn goal-setting strategies.
A personal essay by a former public school teacher in the Teach for America program highlights the differences between school and afterschool education.
The common but under-researched practice of hiring participants as afterschool program staff presents unique challenges but has clear advantages for programs, participant staff members, and communities.
Studies of the effects of afterschool programs on student learning have yielded equivocal findings. This paper argues that such findings stem from weak conceptualizations of the relationship between afterschool programming and learning. The authors use socio-cultural learning theory to reveal specific dimensions of afterschool programs that have positive impact on learning, drawing on almost 200 documents from the afterschool literature to substantiate and elaborate these dimensions. Findings illuminate why afterschool programs that provide “more school after school” significantly limit