Out-of-School-Time Evaluation

In this episode, I chat with Aasha Joshi and Hannah Lantos about their recent chapter "Demystifying data: Strategies and tools for making data more meaningful in OST programs" in the recently released book Measure, Use, Improve! Data Use in Out-of-School Time, edited by Christina Russell and Corey Newhouse. The book will be particularly useful to leadership-level staff in out-of-school time organizations that are thinking about deepening their own learning and evaluation systems, yet aren’t sure where to start.

We talked about:

• What it means to demystify data in OST programs
• How OST program evaluation is unique
• How they and their OST programs are responding to the Covid-19 pandemic

Contact:

• Aasha Joshi: http://www.claritywritingandresearch.com/
• Hannah Lantos: [email protected]
• EvaluLand: Website & Twitter (@EvaluLand)

About the guests:

Aasha Joshi: Aasha’s work is guided by three questions: What’s being done? Is it working? And how can we make it work better? For 15 years, she has been advising, designing, conducting, managing, and integrating robust research and evaluation in organizations so that they can improve their processes, services, and products to meet their goals and make a positive difference in people’s lives. Aasha earned her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Cambridge (UK), studying social interactions and knowledge sharing, and is a co-founder of Clarity Writing and Research, a company formed with a commitment to helping people achieve better outcomes in the education and social sectors.

Hannah Lantos: Hannah Lantos, Ph.D., is a Research Scientist in the Youth Development research area at Child Trends. She has served as project director on both large and small projects that have focused on social and emotional learning, teen pregnancy prevention, protective factors for youth involved in the justice system, and integrating a positive youth development approach into job skills training programs for young adults. She completed her Ph.D. in Public Health with a focus on social and behavioral trends in adolescent health from Johns Hopkins University in 2015. Her work broadly aims to explore how the social and physical environments that adolescents live in affect their health and well-being. Adolescence is a time of amazing growth, skill-building, and navigating challenges. Learning how to navigate challenges in ways that promote learning, kindness, and health drive her work. In particular, she is interested in how contexts can strengthen adolescents’ resiliency as they learn about and engage in healthy decision-making. She has worked with both large, national datasets and small, evaluations and with both quantitative and qualitative data in both domestic and international settings. Before her graduate studies at Johns Hopkins, where she wrote a dissertation comparing adolescent’s experiences with violence in Baltimore and Johannesburg, she worked primarily in international settings. She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in northern Zambia before receiving a Masters of Public Administration in International Development (MPA-ID) and speaks Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish and can still say hello in Bemba (one of the languages spoken in northern Zambia!). She is passionate about applied, multidisciplinary research on adolescent health, well-being, positive development, and in considering the “whole child” as we do research and evaluation on programs that serve young people.

Music by Matt Ingelson, http://www.mattingelsonmusic.com/