Human Services News

HFRP After School Conference Presentations

On December 9, 2005, Harvard Family Research Project and the National Institute for Out-of-School Time cohosted a 1-day summit at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

This summit, made possible through a grant from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, brought together after school staff, administrators, researchers, and funders to discuss how quality assessment looks and feels different for after school programs that serve middle school youth.

The documents below summarize the discussions leading up to the summit, what was learned at the summit, and future directions for policy, practice, and research.

This presentation examined parenting behaviors and their associations with one another and with children's outcomes in early and late adolescence, including children's participation in out-of-school time activities.

Remarks were presented at a session on engaging adolescents in out-of-school time programs at the American Youth Policy Forum in Washington, D.C., on October 7, 2005.

Engaging with families is one of the many strategies that out-of-school time (OST) programs use to create quality, adult-supervised experiences for youth during nonschool hours.

This workshop introduced participants to the latest research and evaluation findings on family involvement in OST programs, and shared strategies for engaging with families, using two case studies to illustrate these practices in context.

This workshop was presented at the Plus Time New Hampshire Annual Afterschool Conference in Bedford, New Hampshire, on October 26, 2004, and the Community Schools Forum in Chicago, Illinois, on March 11, 2005.

Our two workshops provided overviews of key participation challenges: collecting meaningful attendance data and attracting and sustaining youth participation in OST programs.