A webinar outlining ways to promote and cultivate sustainability within CYFAR programming. The webinar explains CYFAR's role in sustainability, the PSAT, how grantees score, and how to use PSAT results.
The CYFAR Program Quality Instrument (PQI) is a 19-item survey measuring the essential elements of youth program quality. This document includes the survey, reliability and validity information, administration guide, scoring instructions, acknowledgements and list of publications using the PQI.
A CYFAR PDF Report which details the CYFAR Common Measures. It assesses CYFAR youth (grades 3-12) in three main domains: resilience, life skills, and program quality. The report provides the data from CYFAR Common Measures in 2022.
A CYFAR document providing a guide to assess outcomes for CYFAR funded programs. This administration guide was created to help CYFAR grantees better prepare to administer survey measures.
A webinar presented by the Children, Youth, and Families At-Risk (CYFAR) Professional Development and Technical Assistance (PDTA) Center that provides an overview of how the CYFAR Logic Model Builder works, its components, and use in developing logic models.
Program quality is not just outcomes but also a point of service quality, or what’s happening within interactions. Components of good program quality can include youth engagement, supportive relationships, critical thinking, and physical and emotional safety. All of these components can serve as intermediate developmental outcomes.
This video explains the importance of a community or school review board in order to protect the people involved in research from harm and experimenters from any legal issues. The review board must know what kind of data will be collected, how information will remain confidential, and how consent will be obtained. Consent can be collected passively or actively and is especially important when working with children.
Youth should be involved throughout the entire process in a collaborative relationship with adults. They can engage by helping think of research questions, issues, focus groups, and observation. It is key to make sure youth aren’t just saying what they do and don’t like but actually making decisions. Adults can help in this process by building their youth engagement skills through exposure to youth culture.
When entering into a new setting the best way to get results is to start with respect, and engagement in the evaluation can be a good way to do this. Key people who know the community can be good people to ask who should be part of the evaluation. People that live and have a commitment to the community know the ways something can be done better than a research team, and they want to feel empowered and part of the process to develop a meaningful outcome and understand its impact.
When a program is evidence-based, it has been through an experimental design, shown to work, and evaluated at a rigorous level. A research-based program means the incorporated content of a program is supported by current research. Model programs are listed on a website called Blueprints shown with the best evidence of effectiveness, but qualifications can vary by website.