Chapin Hall

Chapin Hall Experts Co-Author Foreword to Out-of-School Time Book

Measure, Use, Improve! Data Use in Out-of-School Time is a new book that shares important insights from a broad cross-section of out-of-school time professionals, including internal evaluators, funders, researchers, and policy advocates. Two of Chapin Hall’s experts, Julie Spielberger and Angeline Spain, co-authored the foreword with independent consultant Beth Gamse.

“Out-of-school time programs can have an important influence on children’s academic, social, and personal development—but they vary in availability and quality,” said Dr. Spielberger. “To help staff assess and improve the quality of their programs so they’ll be more beneficial for youth, it’s important to collect, analyze, and use data.”

Topics covered in the book include building support for learning and evaluation within out-of-school time programs, creating and sustaining continuous quality improvement efforts, authentically engaging young people and caregivers in evaluation, and securing funder support for learning and evaluation.

This book will be particularly useful to leadership-level staff in out-of-school time organizations that want to establish evaluation systems, yet aren’t sure where to start. Authors share conceptual frameworks that have helped inform their thinking, walk through practical examples of how they use data in out-of-school time, and offer advice to colleagues.

The book is the fifth in the Current Issues in Out-of-School Time (OST) series published by Information Age Publishing, which promotes and disseminates original theoretical and empirical research, promising practices, and policy perspectives from practitioners to further grow and develop the OST field. Other books in the series include:

• The Growing Out-of-School Time Field: Past, Present, and Future (2017)
• Social and Emotional Learning in Out-Of-School-Time: Foundations and Futures (2018)
• Changemakers! Practitioners Advance Equity and Access in Out-of-School Time Programs (2019)
• At Our Best: Building Youth-Adult Partnerships in Out-of-School Time Settings (2020)

Learn more about the book and order it from Information Age Publishing.