Many elementary school students require and may benefit from supplemental reading support and interventions that can be provided by afterschool programs. The problem addressed in this study was that it was not known if third grade students benefited from an afterschool reading program in one East Tennessee District. The purpose of this…

This quantitative, causal-comparative study aims to examine the academic performance of all third-grade students who participated in after-school tutoring from English Language Arts (ELA) in comparison to those who did not, using the results from the 2022-2023 Mississippi Academic Assessment Program English Language Arts (MAAP ELA) assessment. The…

Background: South African learners face the double disadvantage of living in low socioeconomic conditions with access to few resources and attending schools with challenging learning conditions. Mathematics performance reflects such conditions with extreme performance gaps between wealthier and poorer learners. The need for early intervention is…

Background: In this paper, we extend findings from previous iterations of a design-based project called ThinkerSpaces design studios that promotes human-centred design among children. ThinkerSpaces design studios is a play-based afterschool club that follows principles of embedded design by prioritising learner agency, exploration and ongoing…

Creating Compassion is an empathy-focused creative arts curriculum designed to provide short-term, low-cost, high-quality social-emotional learning (SEL) to communities and settings with limited resources. The present study sought to determine whether Creating Compassion was effective for increasing displays of prosocial behaviors and broad SEL…

We evaluate the direct and inferential mediation (DIME) model for reading comprehension with a sample of struggling readers in Grades 3 to 5 (N = 364) in the context of a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) investigating two theoretically distinct reading interventions (text processing + foundational skills [n = 117] or text processing…

After-school youth development programs support social-emotional functioning which leads to better academic and behavioral outcomes. This article examines three common predictors of social-emotional functioning individually and concurrently to better understand the role of these predictors in the after-school setting. The common predictors are…

Purpose: In a Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility (TPSR) program, Hellison noted that transferring responsibility values to areas beyond the gym was the most important aspect of a responsibility-based program. The purpose of this study was to examine how the use of guided discovery strategies in a TPSR program impacts and promotes how…

Children continuously engage in developing theories about how the world works as they inquire through play and interactions with others. In this study, we investigated children's in-process thinking in the form of working theories about language as they participated in engagements around dual language picturebooks in an afterschool club. Our…

It has been suggested that culturally relevant literature can be beneficial to elementary school students' learning. Yet, less research has focused on African American students' perspectives of that literature, including aspects of that engagement that may benefit their learning. Therefore, the main goal centred on US elementary school students'…

The purpose of this research is to examine the effects of teaching the subjects and concepts under "life in nature" unit of the 3rd grade life science lesson, on the academic achievement and attitudes of the students. In order to achieve this aim, a quasi-experimental model with pretest posttest control group was used in the study. In…

Patterns of afterschool activities were studied in low-income, ethnically diverse children (n = 1796, M age = 8.7 yrs). Cluster analyses indicated four reliable clusters: (a) regular participation in a high-quality afterschool program, (b) regular participation at the afterschool program combined with other extracurricular activities, (c)…

The increase in diagnoses of autism for elementary aged students paired with schools increasingly moving towards inclusive classroom models creates a challenge for general education teachers. This quantitative quasi-experimental study was designed to investigate the efficacy of an after school, explicit social skills intervention, and the impact…

What happened when a global pandemic shut down schools in March of 2020, causing an after-school graphic novel book club to be all but forgotten? Magic happened, when led by a determined instructional literacy coach and a local university professor. Undaunted, they decided to adapt the graphic novel book club into a synchronous virtual experience…

Oftentimes those within a particular minoritized group (e.g., refugees) are assumed to have had the same language and literacy experiences or to hold the same language- and literacy-related values and beliefs. This fails to consider the variation that exists both across and within these groups. Children from refugee backgrounds attend elementary…