Youth Development: OST, Mentoring, & Education Equity
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BellXcel’s Quality Assurance Rubric (QAR) Assessment
Funder: BellXcel
Project Time Period: 2019-2020
Project Category: Education & STEAM/Summer and Afterschool Learning/Evaluation and Performance Management
About BellXcel: BellXcel estimates that 7.5 million children from under-resourced communities are performing significantly below grade level. Studies show a large part of this gap is due to lack of access to high-quality summer and afterschool learning. With third-grade reading as a powerful indicator of life-long success, these cumulative learning gaps lead to devastating consequences for children, families, and the nation as a whole. At BellXcel, they are meeting this crisis head-on. BellXcel’s solutions make it easier for school and nonprofit partners to implement and continuously improve evidence-based summer and afterschool learning programs that empower students and educators.
The Work: MAI was commissioned by BellXcel to review and strengthen BellXcel's quality improvement tools. MAI analyzed BellXcel 2019 summer data in order to understand and document variations in quality across partner sites, investigate the strength of current indicators of quality, and explore how classroom-level quality characteristics are associated with scholar outcomes. MAI also conducted focus groups with a sample of summer 2019 quality assessors to understand their experiences with training and subsequent implementation of the quality tools while onsite.