Partners for Afterschool Success (PASS) AmeriCorps, 2017-2019 Evaluation Report

Partners for After School Success (PASS) is an academic tutoring and afterschool program to support school engagement and academic learning in Dane County, Wisconsin. The PASS Extended Learning Program (ELP) matches AmeriCorps members with after school sites where they coordinate non-cognitive and engagement enrichment activities.

Study Goals:

The goal of the study was to provide accessible, rigorous, and relevant assessment of PASS program performance towards the ultimate goal of program improvement and progress along the evidence continuum. The study focused on:

• Describing the extent to which PASS is implementing its program process to align with its proposed logic model and in a way that is responsive to community and context
• Describing patterns in outcomes of participating students
• Estimating the impact of PASS ELP on student engagement in school compared to similar students not in PASS

Research Questions:

The research questions were:

• To what extent was PASS implementing its program process alignment to its proposed logic model and in a way that is responsive to the community and program context?
  • Is PASS committing the necessary resources or inputs to programming?
  • Are all PASS activities occurring as proposed, including both tutoring and ELP?
  • Are participants receiving the proposed amount of outputs (i.e. hours of programming receive by participating students)?
• What were patterns in outcomes of participating students?
  • Are students participating in PASS gaining knowledge and skills needed for active engagement in school and learning?
  • Are students participating in PASS making academic gains in the desired content areas?
• What was the estimated impact of PASS ELP on student engagement in school compared to similar students not in PASS?

Findings:

The evaluation found the following:

1. The PASS tutoring and ELP models were aligned to their logic model and implementation is consistent overall with some continued variation in conditions on the site level:
   • PASS continued to adjust programming to be responsive to community contexts and needs, as well as the insights from ongoing evaluation process
   • Strong site supervisors provided helpful onsite support and training and helped with making connections throughout the school, though training could be more consistent across sites
   • PASS continued to provide the necessary resources to programming as activity implementation is occurring as designed and students are receiving the intended level of outputs
2. Perceptions of student academic and social/emotional outcomes were positive among staff and students, with more mixed findings on academic outcomes from assessment data.
3. PASS ELP had a significant and positive impact on participant attendance.

For more information, download the full report.