Afterschool Programming Featured in American Journal of Community Psychology

Forum staff Nicole Yohalem and Alicia Wilson-Ahlstrom and the Weikart Center's Executive Director Charles Smith have been published in a special issue of the American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP), Developing and Improving After-School Programs to Enhance Youth’s Personal Growth and Adjustment: A Special Issue of AJCP. This issue examines the current state of afterschool programming and addresses topics including the challenges faced by practitioners; whether after-school programs affect developmental and academic outcomes; and the importance of program quality and how to assess, improve and build such quality.

Nicole and Alicia authored the paper, "Inside the Black Box: Assessing and Improving Quality in Youth Programs," which describes what is known about the relation between youth program quality and youth developmental outcomes, summarizes different quality assessment tools being used in the field and discusses how such tools are being used to drive systemic quality improvement efforts. Charles Smith, Juliane Blazevski and Tom Akiva of the Weikart Center, in conjunction with Stephen C. Peck and Anne-Sophie Denault of the University of Michigan, authored the paper, "Quality at the Point of Service: Profiles of Practice in After-School Settings," which reports on afterschool staff behavior and constructs profiles of common staff practices.

See the contents of the journal and browse abstracts here.