Improving the Quality of After-School Programs
After-school programs serve several distinct purposes. Some are meant to improve educational achievement. Others emphasize keeping youth safe, developing youth talents and interpersonal skills, or meeting the child care needs of working parents. While research shows that some programs can achieve these goals, it also suggests that the typical program needs to get better.

The Foundation supports studies of how after-school programs affect youth. We also support the evaluation of attempts to improve these programs. Finally, we support activities meant to strengthen the communication among researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in the after-school field.

Capacity Building for Group-Randomized Studies
The Foundation frequently supports studies examining the effects of a new initiative or intervention. In doing so, we emphasize a study’s ability to provide unbiased estimates of the effects. This often leads us to support some form of a randomized trial with random assignment of individuals, or groups of individuals (e.g., whole schools or intact classrooms), to program and control conditions.

While group-level experiments are relatively common in some fields, such as criminology and public health, our experience suggested that we needed to build the capacity of scholars to design and execute such studies in youth-related fields with appropriate precision. We are supporting methodological work, training sessions, and a consulting service to build such capacity.