This briefing uses existing statewide and county data to provide California early care and education quality rating and improvement system (QRIS) planners and other stakeholders with important information about some fundamentals of the proposed QRIS rating scheme that could inform California's QRIS design in advance of field-based pilot efforts.
The Real Warriors Campaign, launched in 2009, is a multimedia program designed to promote resilience, facilitate recovery, and support the reintegration of returning servicemembers, veterans, and their families. This report presents the results of an independent assessment of the campaign.
There is a lack of data that address new media use and its potential relationship with adolescent sexual risk behavior and sexual health. The authors developed this matrix of measures to summarize the state of measurement in this arena and set the stage for further research. The measures were extracted from studies of media use, media effects, and interventions that employ new media to improve sexual health. Several new items are also…
The ChalleNGe program seeks to alter the life course of high school dropouts ages 16-18. A rigorous evaluation has shown that the program has positive effects on educational attainment and employment. A cost-benefit analysis supports public investment in the program as currently operated and targeted.
California has taken steps to implement components of a comprehensive professional development system for its early child education workforce. However, further advances are needed and more information is required to identify possible inefficiencies in the current system.
Better child outcomes are the ultimate goal of early care and education (ECE) quality improvement (QI) efforts, but assessing these outcomes is difficult and rarely done. This study identifies five strategies for incorporating child assessments into the design, implementation, and evaluation of QI initiatives such as quality rating and improvement systems. The study assesses the merits of each strategy and offers guidance for its use.
Uses two sources of representative data, the 2005 National Household Education Survey and the 2007 RAND California Preschool Study, to describe child care and early learning arrangements for the approximately 2.8 million California children ages 0 to 5 who are younger than the age at which they would enter kindergarten.
The earliest years of a child's life are critical to physical, socio-emotional, behavioral, and cognitive development. High quality early education can improve readiness and success in school, particularly for disadvantaged children, but access to such programs is uneven.
An expert panel was convened to develop a working knowledge base about the use of new media (such as the Internet, social networking sites, cell phones, online video games, and MP3 players) among adolescents and the potential impact on their sexual health and also to identify appropriate measures for assessing this use, thus setting the stage for future research and intervention.
The Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act funds programs that have been proven effective in curbing crime among juvenile probationers and young at-risk offenders. This report summarizes, for fiscal year 2009–2010, Corrections Standards Authority–mandated outcome measures from each of the programs, as well as county-determined supplemental outcomes.
Japanese translation of Support for Students Exposed to Trauma, including a series of teacher- or school counselor–led lessons aimed at reducing distress for middle school students who have been exposed to a traumatic life event. The program includes skill-building techniques geared toward changing maladaptive thoughts and promoting positive behaviors.
Safe Start Promising Approaches (SSPA) is the second phase of a community-based initiative focused on developing and fielding interventions to prevent and reduce the impact of children's exposure to violence. This report shares the results of SSPA, which was intended to implement and evaluate promising and evidence-based programs in 15 program sites across the country.
A survey tool based on a new methodological framework can be used by the Department of Defense and local military commanders to gauge the problems and problem-related needs of service members and their families, how well those needs are being met, and the barriers and bridges to accessing services.
For communities and organizations working with youth, this manual offers a straightforward and adaptable plan for building community initiatives and youth programs that get results. Because youth programs and community initiatives are required by their funders to document outcomes, this 10-step process poses different accountability questions. Each step is accompanied with examples from Search Institute and Healthy Communities*Healthy…
Testimony presented before the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee provides an overview of RAND's extensive research on how deployment affects service members and their families. Issues addressed include combat-related stress, psychological injuries, willingness to reenlist, and the impact of parental deployment on children.
The post-war trend of falling birth rates has been reversed across Europe. However, despite an increasing emphasis on family and fertility policies in Europe, this recent development involves social, cultural, and economic factors more than individual policy interventions.
Content for a toolkit was designed to help community and faith-based organizations take advantage of opportunities presented in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and engage leaders in promoting health in their communities.
Army children whose parents have deployed 19 months or more since 2001 score lower on standardized tests than other Army children whose parents have deployed for shorter periods of time.
A focus on children, whose ideas are still being developed, may be more effective in promoting tolerance and critical thinking in the Arabic–speaking world than efforts directed toward adults, whose attitudes are already established.
In 2008, the Minnesota Early Learning Foundation created the Saint Paul Early Childhood Scholarship Program, a pilot program to provide families with scholarships to cover the cost of high-quality early childhood education (ECE) programs. This report provides detailed cost and program data for a sample of 12 ECE programs participating in the scholarship program, including the per-child per-hour cost for participation of children in the…
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