Linking after-school instructional practices to youth engagement: A pattern-centered approach

Youth participation in after-school settings has been linked to numerous positive outcomes but this is inconsistent across studies. Two necessary ingredients for this link are proposed: appropriate instructional practices and youth engagement. Both are profiled user cluster analysis in a dataset including observations of staff instructional practices in 151 youth program offerings and 1176 surveys from youth attending these offerings. Instructional practice profiles suggest patterns corresponding to positive youth development (PYD), staff-centered (SC), and low quality. Youth engagement profiles range from low to medium to high, and further vary across perceived learning and voice. Cross-tabulations reveal strong positive links between PYD and high engagement and between low-quality and low engagement; and strong negative links between PYD and low engagement and between low-quality and high engagement.