Functioning in accordance with general policies determined by the Academy, the Council has become the principal operating agency of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering in providing services to the government, the public, and the scientific and engineering communities.
The Council is administered jointly by both Academies and the Institute of Medicine. Alberts and Dr. Wulf are chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the National Research Council. This report is the product of a 2-year project during which a member committee evaluated and integrated the current science of adolescent health and development with research and findings related to program design, implementation, and evaluation of community programs for youth.
The funding for this project was provided by a diverse group of public and private sponsors: the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation in the U. Grant Foundation; and the Ford Foundation. We are also grateful for the support provided to Jacquelynne Eccles, committee chair, by the John D.
MacArthur Foundation and the Center for Ad-. Beyond the expertise and hard work of the committee, we were fortunate to have many leaders in the field enthusiastically participate in this project. These individuals shared their knowledge and years of experience as researchers, evaluators, practitioners, policy makers, and funders of youth programs and interventions.
We are thankful for their time and their intellectual insights. During the planning and early working stages of this project, a small group of well-respected authorities in the area of youth development advised the staff and the committee. We wish to thank these individuals for sharing their wisdom and for their enduring commitment to issues affecting the health, development, and well-being of young people and the institutions that serve them: Peter L.
Grant Foundation; Robin L. Another set of leaders from diverse fields presented their work along with important insights about future directions and current needs: Dale Blyth, Center for. In addition to formal workshops, a number of individuals were invited to make presentations and participate in discussions at the regularly scheduled meetings of the committee.
In October , we were fortunate to participate in a panel discussion about community programs and suggested future research directions with Ann Segal, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation of the U. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Lloyd Kolbe, Division of Adolescent and School Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also discussed the threats to adolescent health and well-being.
In March , several people described public and private supports that exist at the national, state, and local levels and ways in which intermediary organizations are organizing youth programming at the community level. Dale Blyth, Center for 4-H Youth Development, University of Minnesota, and Jeffrey Arnett, University of Maryland, provided their perspectives on positive youth development and suggested developmental milestones that mark or facilitate the end of adolescence and the transition to adulthood.
Michele Cahill, Carnegie Corporation of New York, described the array of activities that currently make up youth development programming. Two committee members spent a day with Richard Catalano at the University of Washington discussing the work he and his colleagues at the Social Development Research Group had done reviewing existing community-based programs for youth.
Three other committee members and one staff person spent time with Bruce Saito and his staff at the Los Angeles Conservation Corps learning about their programs and talking with youth participants. We also wish to acknowledge several consultants who either wrote or helped to write documents that were incorporated into this report: Jonathan Zaff, Child Trends, summarized the data on participation levels in youth programs and the measurement of positive youth outcomes; Naweko Dial, a graduate student at Stanford University, reviewed youth program opportunities on Indian reservations; Candice Jones, a law student at Georgetown University, collected information on youth development funding; Joanna Burton, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois-Champaign and an intern with the National Academies, helped review the research on community, school, and family influences on adolescent development; and Janice Templeton, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, made an extraordinary commitment to reviewing and synthesizing the vast collection of evaluation research on community programs for youth and helped draft Chapters 6 and 7 of this report.
Dozens of scientists provided articles, papers, chapters, and books. Professional photographer Steven Shames taught them to use cameras to capture positive community activities and community change. The photos represent young people engaged in commu-. This report has been reviewed in draft form by individuals chosen for their diverse perspectives and technical expertise, in accordance with procedures approved by the Report Review Committee of the NRC.
The purpose of this independent review is to provide candid and critical comments that will assist the institution in making the published report as sound as possible and to ensure that the report meets institutional standards for objectivity, evidence, and responsiveness to the study charge. The review comments and draft manuscript remain confidential to protect the integrity of the deliberative process. Although the reviewers listed above have provided many constructive comments and suggestions, they were not asked to endorse the conclusions or recommendations nor did they see the final draft of the report before its release.
Appointed by the National Research Council, she was responsible for making certain that an independent examination of this report was carried out in accordance with institutional procedures and that all review comments were carefully considered. Responsibility for the final content of this report rests entirely with the authoring panel and the institution.
It is because of the talent and hard work of Michele Kipke, director of the Board on Children, Youth, and Families, in developing this project and providing encouragement and leadership throughout, that this project was undertaken and completed. We are appreciative of the guidance and mentoring of Elena O. Finally, it is important to acknowledge the exceptional contributions of the National Academies staff who worked on this report. Amy Gawad, research associate, and Rebekah Pinto, senior project assistant, played an invaluable role in collecting, summarizing, and organizing background materials and managing the numerous and often complicated administrative and research responsibilities.
Developmental Challenges, Opportunities, and Risks,. Features That Maximize Positive Development,. Essential Ingredients of Good Programs,. Features of Community Programs for Youth,. Reviews and Meta-Analyses of Evaluations,. Evaluating Community Programs for Youth,. Questions Asked in Comprehensive Evaluation,.
Assessing Program Implementation and Operation,. Research, Evaluation, and Data Collection,. A Fundamental Principles of Human Development. D Related Reports from the National Academies. After-school programs, scout groups, community service activities, religious youth groups, and other community-based activities have long been thought to play a key role in the lives of adolescents. But what do we know about the role of such programs for today's adolescents? How can we ensure that programs are designed to successfully meet young people's developmental needs and help them become healthy, happy, and productive adults?
Community Programs to Promote Youth Development explores these questions, focusing on essential elements of adolescent well-being and healthy development. It offers recommendations for policy, practice, and research to ensure that programs are well designed to meet young people's developmental needs. The book also discusses the features of programs that can contribute to a successful transition from adolescence to adulthood. It examines what we know about the current landscape of youth development programs for America's youth, as well as how these programs are meeting their diverse needs.
Recognizing the importance of adolescence as a period of transition to adulthood, Community Programs to Promote Youth Development offers authoritative guidance to policy makers, practitioners, researchers, and other key stakeholders on the role of youth development programs to promote the healthy development and well-being of the nation's youth. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.
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No thanks. Page i Share Cite. Suggested Citation: "Front Matter. Community Programs to Promote Youth Development. Page ii Share Cite. Printed in the United States of America. Copyright by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Physical and health dangers; fear; feeling of insecurity, sexual and physical harassment; and verbal abuse.
Limit setting; clear and consistent rules and expectations; firm-enough control; continuity and predictability; clear boundaries; and age-appropriate monitoring. Warmth; closeness; connectedness; good communication; caring; support; guidance; secure attachment; and responsiveness.
Cold; distant; overcontrolling; ambiguous support; untrustworthy; focused on winning; inattentive; unresponsive; and rejecting. Rules of behavior; expectations; injunctions; ways of doing things; values and morals; and obligations for service.
Normlessness; anomie; laissez-faire practices; antisocial and amoral norms; norms that encourage violence; reckless behavior; consumerism; poor health practices; and conformity. Practices that include enabling; responsibility granting; and meaningful challenge.
Practices that focus on improvement rather than on relative current performance levels. Unchallenging; overcontrolling; disempowering; and disabling. Practices that undermine motivation and desire to learn, such as excessive focus on current relativeperformance level rather than improvement. Opportunities to learn physical, intellectual, psychological, emotional, and social skills; exposure to intentional learning experiences; opportunities to learn cultural literacies, media literacy, communication skills, and good habits of mind; preparation for adult employment; and opportunities to develop social and cultural capital.
Practice that promotes bad physical habits and habits of mind; and practice that undermines school and learning. Many different individual organizations provide community programs for youth; each has its own unique approach and activities. How communities organize youth policies, as well as support individual programs, also varies from community to community. A private intermediary organization or an individual charismatic leader, such as a minister or a rabbi, might also organize such efforts.
However, it is often the case that there is no single person or group that is responsible for either monitoring the range and quality of community programs for youth or making sure that information about community programs is easily accessible to members of the community.
Adolescents who spend time in communities that are rich in developmental opportunities for them experience less risk and show evidence of higher rates of positive development.
A diversity of program. Community programs for youth differ in their objectives, design, approach, and focus, and some may choose to emphasize certain program features over others. Even with the best staff and best funding, no single program can necessarily serve all young people or incorporate all of the features of positive developmental settings. The complexities of adolescent development and the increasing diversity of the country make the heterogeneity of young people in communities both a norm and a challenge.
Therefore, effective programs must be flexible enough to adapt to this diversity among the young people they serve and the communities in which they operate. Recommendation 2 —Communities should provide an ample array of program opportunities that appeal to and meet the needs of diverse youth, and should do so through local entities that can coordinate such work across the entire community.
Particular attention should be placed on programs for disadvantaged and underserved youth. Recommendation 3 —To increase the likelihood that an ample array of program opportunities will be available, communities should put in place some locally appropriate mechanism for monitoring the availability, accessibility, and quality of programs for youth in their community. Recommendation 4 —Private and public funders should provide the resources needed at the community level to develop and support community-wide programming that is orderly, coordinated, and evaluated in reasonable ways.
In addition to support at the community level, this is likely to involve support for intermediary organizations and collaborative teams that include researchers, practitioners, funders, and policy makers.
The multiple groups concerned about community programs for youth—policy makers, families, program developers and practitioners, program staff, and young people themselves—have in common the desire to know whether programs make a difference in the lives of young people, their families, and their communities. Some are interested in. Research, program evaluation, and social indicator data can help improve the design and delivery of programs, and in doing so can play a significant role in answering such questions and improving the well-being and future success of young people.
The committee first reviewed research on both adolescent development and the features of positive developmental settings that support it. In both cases, the research base is just becoming comprehensive enough to allow for tentative conclusions about the individual assets that characterize positive development and features of settings that support it.
The committee used a variety of criteria to suggest the tentative lists of both important individual-level assets and features of settings that support positive development outlined in Box ES-1 and Table ES These suggestions are based on scientific evidence from short- and long-term experimental and observational studies, one-time large-scale survey studies, and longitudinal survey studies reviewed by the committee.
However, much more comprehensive work is needed. More comprehensive longitudinal research, that either builds on current efforts or involves new efforts, is needed on a wider range of populations that follows children and adolescents well into adulthood in order to understand which assets are most important to adolescent development and which patterns of assets are linked to particular types of successful adult transitions in various cultural contexts.
Despite its limitations, research in all settings in the lives of adolescents—families, schools, and communities—is yielding consistent evidence that there are specific features of settings that support positive youth development and that these features can be incorporated into community programs. Very few integrated programs have received the kind of comprehensive experimental evaluation necessary to make a firm recommendation about replicating the program in its entirety across the country.
However, there is sufficient evidence from a variety of sources to make recommendations about fundamental principles of supportive developmental settings and some specific aspects of programs that can be used to design community programs for youth. These are captured by the features of supportive settings outlined in Table ES Recommendation 5 —Federal agencies that fund research on adolescent health, development, and well-being, such as the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Education, should build into their portfolios new or more comprehensive longitudinal and experimental research on the personal and social assets needed to promote the healthy development and well-being of adolescents and to promote the successful transition from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood.
Recommendation 6 —Public and private funders should support research on whether the features of positive developmental settings identified in this report are the most important features of community programs for youth.
This research should encourage program design and implementation that meets the diverse needs of an increasingly heterogeneous population of youth. Evaluation and ongoing program study can provide important insights to inform program design, selection, and modification.
Program evaluation can also help funders and policy makers make informed choices about which programs to fund for which groups of youth. The desire to conduct high-quality evaluation can help program staff clarify their objectives and decide which types of evidence will be most useful in determining if these objectives have been met.
Ongoing program study and evaluation can also be used by program staff, program participants, and funders to track program objectives; this is typically done by establishing a system for ongoing data collection that measures the extent to which various aspects of the programs are being delivered, how are they delivered, who is providing these services, and who is receiving these services.
Such information can provide useful information to program. Finally, program evaluation can test both new and very well developed program designs by assessing the immediate, observable results of the program outcomes and benefits associated with participation in the program.
Such summative evaluation can be done in conjunction with strong theory-based evaluation or as a more preliminary assessment of the potential usefulness of novel programs and quite complex social experiments in which there is no well-specified theory of change.
In other words, program evaluation and study can help foster accountability, determine whether programs make a difference, and provide staff with the information they need to improve service delivery. Clearly there are many purposes for evaluation. Not surprisingly then, there are different opinions among service practitioners, researchers, policy makers, and funders about the most appropriate and useful methods for evaluating community programs for youth.
In part, these disagreements reflect different goals and different questions about youth programs. They also reflect philosophical differences about the purposes of evaluation and nature of program development. Program practitioners, policy makers, program evaluators, and others studying programs should decide exactly which questions they want answered before deciding on the most appropriate methods.
The most comprehensive experimental evaluation, which involves assessment of the quality of implementation as well as outcomes, is quite expensive and involves a variety of methods. It also provides the most comprehensive information regarding both the effectiveness of specific programs and the reasons for their effectiveness. Very few high-quality comprehensive experimental evaluations of community programs for youth have adequately assessed the impact of the programs on adolescents.
Some high-quality experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations show positive effects on a variety of outcomes, including both increases in the psychological and social assets of youth and decreases in the incidence of such problem behaviors as early pregnancy, drug use, and delinquency. Experimental designs are still the best method for estimating the impact of a program on its participants and should be used when this is the goal of the evaluation.
Comprehensive program evaluation is an even better way to gather complete information about programs. It requires asking a number of questions through various methods. The committee identified six fundamental questions that should be considered in comprehensive evaluations:. In general, is the program effective and, in particular, is it effective with specific subpopulations of young people?
All six questions may not be answered well in one study; several evaluative studies may be needed to address these questions. Thus comprehensive experimental evaluation can be quite expensive and time-consuming—but provides the most information about program design, as well as fundamental questions about human development. Thus, it is particularly useful to both the policy and research communities, as well as the practice community.
In order to generate the kind of information about community programs for youth needed to justify large-scale expenditures on programs and to further fundamental understanding of the role of community programs in youth development, comprehensive experimental program evaluations should be used when:.
Comprehensive experimental evaluations are not appropriate for newer, less established programs or programs that lack a well-articulated. A variety of nonexperimental methods, such as interviewing, case studies, and observational techniques, and more focused experimental and quasi-experimental studies are ways to understand and assess these types of community programs for youth.
Although the nonexperimental methods tell us less about the effectiveness of particular community programs than experimental program evaluations, they can, when carefully implemented, provide information about the strengths and weakness in program implementation and can be used to identify patterns of effective practice.
They are also quite helpful in generating hypotheses about why programs fail. Programs that meet the following criteria should be studied through nonexperimental or more focused experimental and quasi-experimental methods, depending on the goals of the evaluation:. An organization, program, project, or program element that has not matured sufficiently in terms of its philosophy and implementation;.
The evaluation has to be conducted by the staff of the program under evaluation;. The major questions of interest pertain to the quality of the program theory, the implementation of that theory, or to the nature of its participants, staff, or surrounding context;. The program is quite broad, involving multiple agencies in the same community; and.
The program or organization is interested in reflective practice and continuing improvement. Whether experimental or nonexperimental methods are used, high-quality, comprehensive evaluation is important to the future development and success of community programs for youth and should be used by all programs and youth-serving organizations. Recommendation 7 —All community programs for youth should undergo evaluation—possibly multiple evaluations—to improve design and implementation, to create accountability, and to assess outcomes and impacts.
For any given evaluation, the scope and the rigor should be appropriately calibrated to the attributes of the program, the available resources, and the goals of the evaluation. Recommendation 8 —Funders should provide the necessary funds for evaluation. In many cases, this will involve support for collaborative teams of researchers, evaluators, theoreticians, policy makers, and practitioners to ensure that programs are well designed initially and then evaluated in the most appropriate way.
Over the past decade, social indicator data and technical assistance resources have become increasingly important tools that community programs can employ to support every aspect of their work—from initial planning and design, to tracking goals, program accountability, targeting services, reflection, and improvement.
There are now significant data and related technical assistance resources to aid in understanding the young people involved in these programs. Community programs for youth benefit from ready access to high-quality data that allow them to assess and monitor the well-being of youth in their community, the well-being of youth they directly serve, and the elements of their programs that are intended to support those youth.
They also benefit from information and training to help them use these data tools wisely and effectively. Even when exploited to their full potential, administrative, vital statistics, and related data sources can cover only limited geographic areas and only some components of a youth development framework. Adding local survey data in diverse communities, as has been done in a number of states and individual communities, can help create a more complete picture.
Community programs for youth are interested in building their capacity to assess the quality of their programs. To produce useful process evaluations, performance monitoring, and self-assessment, however, program practitioners need valid, reliable indicators and measures of the developmental quality of the experiences they provide.
Such information would also facilitate the ability of communities to monitor change over time as new program initiatives are introduced into the community. If communities know how their youth are doing on a variety of indicators for an extended period of time both before and after a new program. Such inferences are strengthened if information on the same indicators is available in comparable communities that did not introduce that program at the same time.
Research is needed to determine whether appropriate indicators vary depending on the characteristics of the specific youth population served by a program and as understanding of the determinants of positive youth development improves, these indicators should be periodically revisited and, if necessary, revised.
Many community programs also lack staff knowledge and the funds to take full advantage of social indicators as tools to aid in planning, monitoring, assessing, and improving program activities. Individual programs and communities would benefit from opportunities to improve their capacity to collect and use social indicator data. Recommendation 9 —Public and private funders should support the fielding of youth development surveys in more states and communities around the country; the development, testing, and fielding of new youth development measures that work well across diverse population subgroups; and greater coordination between measures used in community surveys and national longitudinal surveys.
Recommendation 10 —Public and private funders should support collaboration between researchers and the practice community to develop social indicator data that build understanding of how programs are implemented and improve the ability to monitor programs. Collaborative efforts would further the understanding of the relationship between program features and positive developmental outcomes among young people. Recommendation 11 —Public and private funders should provide opportunities for individual programs and communities to increase their capacity to collect and use social indicator data.
This requires better training for program staff and more support for national and regional intermediaries that provide technical assistance in a variety of ways, including Internet-based systems. After-school programs, scout groups, community service activities, religious youth groups, and other community-based activities have long been thought to play a key role in the lives of adolescents. But what do we know about the role of such programs for today's adolescents?
How can we ensure that programs are designed to successfully meet young people's developmental needs and help them become healthy, happy, and productive adults? Community Programs to Promote Youth Development explores these questions, focusing on essential elements of adolescent well-being and healthy development.
It offers recommendations for policy, practice, and research to ensure that programs are well designed to meet young people's developmental needs. The book also discusses the features of programs that can contribute to a successful transition from adolescence to adulthood.
It examines what we know about the current landscape of youth development programs for America's youth, as well as how these programs are meeting their diverse needs. Recognizing the importance of adolescence as a period of transition to adulthood, Community Programs to Promote Youth Development offers authoritative guidance to policy makers, practitioners, researchers, and other key stakeholders on the role of youth development programs to promote the healthy development and well-being of the nation's youth.
Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website. Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.
Switch between the Original Pages , where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text. To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter. Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available. Do you enjoy reading reports from the Academies online for free? Sign up for email notifications and we'll let you know about new publications in your areas of interest when they're released.
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