Background: Staff play a critical role in promoting positive youth development in out-of-school-time programs, yet little is known about best-practices for preparing staff to work with youth and meet their needs. The present study seeks to understand the impact of a basic psychological needs training on the staff's ability to deliver…

The study investigates whether and how mock interviews, an instructional component of business Chinese courses, prepare students for real interviews. The study included 11 American undergraduate students who participated in a 10-week summer study abroad program in China. Participants underwent two rounds of mock interviews with their instructors…

This longitudinal quantitative study determined the impact of a summer mathematics academy for early learners on their number sense and how their number sense compared to that of their peers who did not attend the academy. The Texas Early Mathematics Inventory -- Progress Monitoring (TEMI-PM) was used to measure students' number sense. Results…

Parent anxiety can limit a parent's willingness to involve their child in out-of-school time experiences such as summer camps. Researchers have studied anxiety within the context of camp, but these studies used narrow frameworks of anxiety. In this exploratory study, we collected open-ended responses about causes of parent anxiety associated with…

Study abroad attempts to prepare students to effectively work in a multi-national environment. This study compares students' experiences in a unit operations laboratory course offered in multiple modalities: at students' home university, and four- and eight-week study abroad. The results examine the impact of support on students' learning and…

To support practitioners' need for reliable and valid measures of the youth camp experience, this study compares the results of two analytic approaches--(1) composite-based paired samples t tests and (2) a latent structural equation model approach--using the Parental Perceptions of Developmental Outcomes (PPDO) scale in a sample of 930 parents of…

This study used a quasi-experimental design to compare the effects of an intercultural development program on students' Cultural Intelligence (CQ) compared with students in a summer research program who did not receive the intervention. Social Learning Theory guided a 9-week student-centered cultural learning course focused on attention,…

There are increasing calls to introduce computational thinking in schools; the arguments in favor call upon research suggesting that even kindergarten children can successfully engage in coding. This contribution presents a cross-sectional study examining the coding practices and computational thinking of fifty-one primary school children using…

Many adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) experience challenges in social competence. Evidence suggests that specialized summer camps with social skills training may have positive outcomes on social competence development in adolescents with ADHD. This article reports on a pilot study of a therapeutic summer camp…

In the past decades, collaborative game-based learning has been used to facilitate students' learning in authentic learning contexts. Although several previous studies have reported the potential of this approach for students' learning performance and motivation, unequal participation could negatively influence the learning effectiveness of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe the role and characteristics of the summer internship program (Digital Summer Clinic) delivered by Eastern Michigan University. The authors report the results of an exploratory study of interns participating in the Digital Summer Clinic over a five-year time period. The study captures and analyzes…

The present study explores the effects of structured input and traditional instruction on the acquisition of English causative passive forms using online measurements (eye-tracking). Previous empirical research investigating the effects of processing instruction through offline measurements (sentence and discourse) has overall shown positive…

This U.S. study evaluated the effects of a reading intervention for emergent bilingual students with significant reading difficulties in Grades 6 and 7 within a multisite randomized controlled trial. Emergent bilinguals were randomized to a researcher-provided intervention (n = 171) or business-as-usual comparison condition (n = 169). Results on a…

A primary motivation for this study was to compare student perceptions and performance within a virtual learning environment to the traditional in-person learning experience for the General Chemistry II course taught during a 5-week summer session at Xavier University of Louisiana, a minority serving institution. The authors present quantitative…

Physics program for girls (PPG) is a two-week program held every summer since 2006, with the goal of engaging young women in inquiry-based physics experiments and to connect them with female science, technology, engineering, and mathematics professional role models. The program recruits young women to participate the summer after they have taken…