Program Profile: Boys and Girls Club - Project Learn

This is an out-of-school program designed to improve educational performance in adolescents. This program is rated Promising. The program showed a statistically significant positive effect on participants’ attainment of higher grades in math, reading, spelling, history, science, and social studies, and a higher attendance rate, compared with students who did not participate. However, there was no statistically significant difference between groups in English, writing, and geography grades.

A Promising rating implies that implementing the program may result in the intended outcome(s).

Program Goals

Project Learn is a non-school program of the Boys & Girls Club (BGC) that aims to enhance educational performance of economically disadvantaged adolescents through the provision of out-of-school educational enrichment activities. The program strives to increase students’ interest in education and their scholastic abilities to improve their school grades. The objective is to offset the gamut of problems associated with low educational achievement, including difficult behavior and limited employment opportunities.

Target Population

The program targets economically disadvantaged young adolescents from public housing. It aims to increase effectiveness of out-of-school educational activities by targeting neighborhoods and youth who are most at risk and most in need of resources. Participating youth are typically between 10 and 14 years of age.

Program Activities

The educational enhancement program takes place in the BGC facilities or an outside setting, depending on the activity, and students are engaged in a structured program. The Project Learn weekly curriculum includes:

• 4 to 5 hours of discussion with knowledgeable adults
• 1 to 2 hours of creative writing
• 4 to 5 hours of leisure reading
• 5 to 6 hours of school homework completion
• 2 to 3 hours helping other youth with homework, projects, and skills acquisition
• 4 to 5 hours of games and recreation that draw on cognitive and transferable skills

Participating youth receive incentives for attendance, including field trips, school supplies, additional computer time, and special privileges at their BGC. Additionally, participating youths’ parents are encouraged to join certain activities, particularly homework completion and reading sessions.

Key Personnel

The program requires BGC staff assisted by parents and other volunteers delivering the Project Learn curriculum to be trained by BGC professionals from their national headquarters. The training is delivered in a 1-day workshop. A local BGC staff member acts as the Education Enhancement Coordinator and is assisted by other BGC staff, school representatives, parent leaders, and housing authority and resident council representatives.

Program Theory

Project Learn aims to offer additional educational activities and resources, as well as enrichment activities, not otherwise available to low-income families in order to increase positive scholastic performance. The program suggests that by offering such activities, youth can overcome the educational adversities they face in many overwhelmed inner-city schools throughout the United States, and that out-of-school programs targeting at-risk youth have increased educational potential.

Study 1

Schinke and colleagues (2000) evaluated the effects of Project Learn on youth in public housing in New York City, N.Y., Cleveland, Ohio, Oakland, Calif., Tampa, Fla., and Edinburgh, Texas. This program was implemented by Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGC) in communities they already served. For the purpose of the evaluation, a site in each city that had BGC, but not the Project Learn enhancement, was matched on demographics, youth proportion, size, and public housing service population of the Treatment sites to serve as the Comparison site. Additionally, a Control site was matched to each Treatment site using a youth facility that was not BGC and did not provide educational enhancements to their adolescent students. In total, 15 sites were used (five Treatment, five Comparison, and five Control), matched on geographic and demographic variables. Youth and parents at each site completed informed consent statements. The total number of participants at baseline was 283. At the 18-month follow-up, the number of participants had decreased to 249, and to 191 by the final 30-month follow-up. An attrition analysis showed participant drop-off did not differ significantly between intervention groups and sites.

Of the 283 youth across the 15 sites at baseline, the average age was 12.3 years. Forty percent were female. The participant group was 63 percent Black, 19 percent Hispanic, 13 percent white, and 5 percent Asian or of another ethnicity. There were no significant differences in age, gender, or ethnicity between groups. Although treatment and comparison youth came from BGCs, control youth were regular users of their facilities, which included after-school, recreational, and human services programs. Treatment sites were encouraged to participate in the evaluation when chosen; comparison sites were motivated by the receipt of the program after the evaluation; and control sites received a financial incentive at each measurement.

Data from schools were collected to assess students’ performance in mathematics, English grammar, composition, reading, spelling, history, science, social studies, and geography. Schools also provided attendance records and behavioral incidents. Researchers used analysis of variance to test for differences between the treatment, comparison, and control groups. The CrimeSolutions review looked at the differences between the treatment sites that implemented the Project Learn enhancements to the BGCs and control sites that had no BGCs, at the 30-month follow up. Subgroup analyses were not conducted.

Implementation of the program, including training, is completed through the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. For more information, please contact your local Boys & Girls Club or visit their website at https://www.bgca.org.

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

Following are CrimeSolutions-rated programs that are related to this practice:

Targeted Truancy Interventions

These interventions are designed to increase attendance for elementary and secondary school students with chronic attendance problems. The practice is rated Effective for improving attendance.

Evidence Ratings for Outcomes

Education - Attendance/truancy

Dropout Prevention Programs

School- or community-based programs targeting frequently absent students or students at risk of dropping out of school. These programs are aimed at increasing school engagement, school attachment, and the academic performance of students, with the main objective of increasing graduation rates. The practice is rated Effective for reducing rates of school dropouts, and rated Promising for improving test scores/grades, graduation rates, and attendance.

Evidence Ratings for Outcomes

	Education - Dropout
	Education - Academic achievement/school performance
	Education - Graduation
	Education - Attendance/truancy

Why might a practice's outcome ratings differ from the ratings of specific programs encompassed by that practice?