Afterschool quality.

This chapter discusses efforts to define and improve the quality of afterschool services, highlighting areas of agreement and identifying leading-edge issues. We conclude that the afterschool field is especially well positioned to deliver high-quality services and demonstrate effectiveness at scale because a strong foundation has been built for continuous improvement of service quality.

Mindfulness training effects for parents and educators of children with special needs.

Parents and teachers of children with special needs face unique social-emotional challenges in carrying out their caregiving roles. Stress associated with these roles impacts parents' and special educators' health and well-being, as well as the quality of their parenting and teaching. No rigorous studies have assessed whether mindfulness training (MT) might be an effective strategy to reduce stress and cultivate well-being and positive caregiving in these adults. This randomized controlled study assessed the efficacy of a 5-week MT program for parents and educators of children with special needs. Participants receiving MT showed significant reductions in stress and anxiety and increased mindfulness, self-compassion, and personal growth at program completion and at 2 months follow-up in contrast to waiting-list controls. Relational competence also showed significant positive changes, with medium-to-large effect sizes noted on measures of empathic concern and forgiveness. MT significantly influenced caregiving competence specific to teaching. Mindfulness changes at program completion mediated outcomes at follow-up, suggesting its importance in maintaining emotional balance and facilitating well-being in parents and teachers of children with developmental challenges.

Quality at the point of service: profiles of practice in after-school settings.

A unique observational data set was used to explore quality at the point of service in after-school programs. Staff practices in after-school settings were represented on a series of unidimensional scales closely indexed to staff behavior. In order to account for heterogeneity of staff performances, pattern-centered methods were used to construct profiles of common staff practices. Results revealed six pedagogy profiles that were classified in terms of three broad types of performances delivered by after-school staff: (1) positive youth development, (2) staff-centered, and (3) low-quality. Staff membership in these profiles was not related to youth-staff ratio. However, results revealed significant differences between the profiles on the content of the offering and the age of youth in the setting.

Quality and accountability in the out-of-school-time sector.

In the fragmented out-of-school-time sector, defining and measuring quality in terms of staff behaviors at the point of service provides a common framework that can reduce obstacles to cross-sector and cross-program performance improvement efforts and streamline adoption of data-driven accountability policies. This chapter views the point of service, that is, the microsettings where adults and youth purposefully interact, as the critical unit of study because it is ubiquitous across out-of-school-time programs and because it is the place where key developmental experiences are intentionally delivered. However, because point-of-service behaviors are embedded within multilevel systems where managers set priorities and institutional incentives constrain innovation, effective quality interventions must contend with and attend to this broader policy environment. The Youth Program Quality Assessment (Youth PQA) is one of an emerging class of observational assessment tools that measure staff performances at the point of service and, depending on methodology of use, can help create the conditions that managers and youth workers need to accept, adopt, and sustain accountability initiatives. Observational assessment tools can be flexible enough to be used for program self-assessment (appropriate for low-stakes, non-normative learning purposes), external assessment (appropriate for higher stakes, normative comparisons, and performance accountability), and various hybrids that combine elements from each. We provide advice for decision makers regarding how to most effectively use the Youth PQA and similar measurement tools depending on the articulation of clear purposes for which accountability and improvement policies are enacted and effective sequencing of implementation.

Improving quality at the point of service.

The authors provide a research-based construct of youth program quality that differentiates safety, support, interaction, and engagement, four important issues for practitioners working with youth in the middle years. They describe two tools that have helped direct staff to be intentional about creating offerings that are appropriate for early adolescents: the focusing idea of point-of-service quality and the technology of observational assessment. They describe how these tools can be used to create cultures of accountability and intentionality that extend across program levels.