Resource Category

Youth Social Settings

From 2004 to 2014, the Foundation supported research to understand and improve the everyday social settings that influence youth development. Studies enriched theory and knowledge of how schools, neighborhoods, families, and after-school programs affect youth.

Featured Resources

Evidence-Based Policy

2011

The Big Why: A Learning Agenda for the Scale-Up Movement

By Robert Granger

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Improving the Quality of Classroom Interactions

The Foundation has funded several innovative classroom interventions designed to alter settings in ways that result in positive outcomes for the youth within them. In order to change a setting for the better, we need to first understand how that setting works. To that end, we have developed a theoretical framework to guide our intervention research and funded a number of studies on the development of reliable and valid measures of classroom processes. Strong theory and good measures are critical components in the development of a thorough understanding of settings.

Research Methods
Education
The Big Why: A Learning Agenda for the Scale-Up Movement

Policymakers and practitioners who believe that research evidence should inform policy and practice face several challenges. These include debates about the standards of evidence for allocating resources to programs, weak information on how to produce change at scale, and concerns that a few, well-evaluated programs will drive out others that deserve support.

Use of Research Evidence
Evidence-Based Policy
Confidence Bounds and Power for the Reliability of Observational Measures on the Quality of a Social Setting

"Social scientists are frequently interested in assessing the qualities of social settings such as classrooms, schools, neighborhoods, or day care centers. The most common procedure requires observers to rate social interactions within these settings on multiple items and then to combine the item responses to obtain a summary measure of setting quality. A key aspect of the quality of such a summary measure is its reliability. In this paper we derive a confidence interval for reliability, a test for the hypothesis that the reliability meets a minimum standard, and the power of this test against alternative hypotheses. Next, we consider the problem of using data from a preliminary field study of the measurement procedure to inform the design of a later study that will test substantive hypotheses about the correlates of setting quality."

Research Methods
From Soft Skills to Hard Data: Measuring Youth Program Outcomes

"From Soft Skills to Hard Data reviews ten youth outcome measurement tools that are appropriate for use in after-school and other settings. For each tool, it provides sample items and crucial information about usability, cost, and evidence of reliability and validity. A companion to the Forum’s Measuring Youth Program Quality, the guide can help providers select conceptually grounded, psychometrically sound measures appropriate for programs that serve upper-elementary- through high school-aged youth."

Youth Social Settings
After-school Programs
MET Database at the Institute for Social Research

This site enables users to apply for access to quantitative data and classroom videos created by the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Research Methods
Group Randomized Trials
Studying the Reliability of Group-Level Measures with Implications for Statistical Power: A Six-Step Paradigm

Many youth development programs aim to improve youth outcomes by raising the quality of social interactions occurring in groups such as classrooms, athletic teams, therapy groups, after-school programs, or recreation centers. As a result, evaluators are increasingly interested in determining whether such programs significantly improve “group quality.” This paper consider methods for studying the reliability of measures of group quality, with implications for the design of evaluation studies, and illustrates these methods using a large-scale data set on classroom observations.

Research Methods
Tools
Our Work on the Quality of After-school Programs: 2003–2011

During the past eight years, the after-school field has made real progress, particularly in understanding what “high-quality practice” means and how to measure it. And we at the Foundation have learned a great deal about how to do our work from our efforts in this area. This essay describes what we learned and the implications for the future. Woven throughout is an overview of how the after-school field has evolved and the issues that remain.

Youth Social Settings
After-school Programs
The William T. Grant Foundation: Contributions to the After-school Field, 2003-2011

This review of the Foundation’s grantmaking and staff work on the quality of after-school programs from 2003–2011 will help trustees and staff learn about the effects of their strategies during this time and inform the Foundation’s future work.

Youth Social Settings
After-school Programs
Measuring Youth Program Quality: A Guide to Assessment Tools, 2nd Edition

The Forum for Youth Investment developed this report to help individuals and systems make sound decisions about what assessment tools and related resources will best meet their program assessment and improvement needs.

Youth Social Settings
After-school Programs

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