Why After-School Matters for Positive Youth Development

Abstract

The developmental importance of informal and experiential learning in child and adolescent development has been well documented in academic literature. These robust findings, however, have not found a consistent home in education policy or practice in the U.S. Every decade has its share of innovative educational approaches that redefine learning goals and practices and promise to restructure settings and systems. Few of these, however, make the move from the margins to the mainstream. U.S. education policy and practice, as a consequence, continue to be constrained by a stubborn insistence on seat time and standardized test results as the operating proxies for learning. These two anchoring "time and tests" constraints have become accepted as the starting point for defining the "who, what, when, where, why and how" of what is now commonly referred to as the after-school field. The extent to which the field is tethered to these constraints is embodied in the dominant terms used to describe it. School-linked terms such as after-school, out of school time, extended learning, and expanded learning dominate compared to more independent terms such as informal, free-choice and experiential learning, and youth development programs. The growing use of the terms non-academic and non-cognitive to describe abilities that are important for educational success but hard to measure with tests is another example of the pressure to define Positive Youth Development goals in relation to educational success. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)