STRIVE - Boys & Girls Club
Locations
- Boys and Girls Club of the Northern Indiana Corridor, Indiana
Focus Area
- Education
Our hope at BGCNIC is that every child can achieve their full potential and build a foundation for lifelong success.
The Issue
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated already high achievement gaps in K-12 education. Students across the country were pulled from the classroom and returned to new challenges at home. Some students had parents who didn’t work much or parents who worked from home and had some time to help them parse through their math and reading assignments. Others had parents who were emergency, essential, or healthcare workers who were not able to be present for their child's remote learning. Those students had far fewer resources during a vital year of education, and they returned to in-person instruction even further behind their peers.
There is a growing body of literature suggesting that the movement away from in-person instruction during the 2020-21 school year reduced student achievement, worsened children’s mental health, and decreased school enrollment. And research suggests that students in lower-income districts lost more ground than higher-income ones during the pandemic.
For 50 years, the Boys & Girls Club of the Northern Indiana Cooridor (BGCNIC) has provided after school programming for youth in need. Youth development professionals at the Club have witnessed the strain of the pandemic on already underserved students. During the 2021-22 school year, 84% of club members were one or more grade levels behind in literacy and 92% of club members were behind in math.
Prior studies demonstrate the effectiveness of comprehensive youth programs. But BGCNIC offers a unique model, where academics are combined with emotional wellbeing in the lesson plan. To completely address the achievement gap and the devastating impacts of the pandemic on that gap, we need to understand how to best support our students after the school day is over.
The Intervention
Across club locations in St. Joseph County, Indiana, BGCNIC offers academic support and enrichment for students who might not otherwise have a place to go after school. They aim to provide students with the tools they need to excel academically and the emotional regulation tools they need to thrive in life.
Specifically, their STRIVE program builds upon the typical after-school club experience, combining STEM, literacy, and social-emotional learning components into a single program. This study will examine the effectiveness of targeted academic enrichment as well as the combination of targeted academic enrichment and social-emotional learning.
Research Question
Does participation in the STRIVE program impact academic outcomes including grades, standardized test scores, and school attendance as well as behavioral outcomes measured through incident reports and teacher-reported behavior?
Intended Outcomes
- Students who participate in academic enrichment programming will demonstrate academic improvement, including higher homework completion rates, school attendance, and standardized test scores.
- Students who participate in emotional well-being programming will have better behavioral outcomes as reported by their teachers.
Research Study Design
The BGCNIC project is a randomized control trial. The research team will randomly split participants into three groups. The first group will receive the STRIVE program, which includes standard club programing plus the academic enrichent and emotional well-being components. The second group will receive standard club programming plus the academic enrichment component. The third group will serve as the control group and receive standard club programming without the additional components.
LEO researchers will use data from local school districts to measure grades, standardized test scores and school attendance. They will also measure behavioral outcomes through the administration of a strengths and difficulties questionnaire (SDQ) to the teachers of study participants.