Youth Development
The Center for Youth Program Quality is a joint venture of the Forum for Youth Investment and HighScope Educational Research Foundation. The Center is dedicated to improving youth experiences in the places where they spend time, particularly in after-school and other out-of-school environments. We offer training, technical assistance, and research services that all come together in the Youth Program Quality Intervention system.
Youth Program Quality Intervention
The Youth Program Quality Intervention (YPQI) is a comprehensive system for improving the quality of youth programs. The YPQI is currently operating nationally in numerous state- and county-wide accountability, monitoring, and improvement systems. It is affordable, powerful, and easy to use.
Accountability and monitoring
The Youth Program Quality Assessment (PQA) is the glue that holds the YPQI together. The research-validated Youth PQA is a dual-purpose assessment instrument: robust enough to use for high-stakes monitoring and research purposes and user-friendly enough for program self-assessment.
The Youth PQA measures what matters most — staff and youth interaction at the point of service. The instrument contains quality rating scales that focus on safety, support, peer interaction, and youth engagement and voice.
The YPQI gives you program quality data at your fingertips. The YPQI Online Reporter helps you monitor progress, print automatic reports, and compare data.
Program improvement
Traditional training can be time consuming and can have limited effects. Therefore, the YPQI maximizes training impact by having staff members first identify their program strengths and areas for improvement. Professional development can then be tailored and greatly reduced in time. The YPQI is faster, cheaper, and more empowering than traditional training.
Easy steps
In the YPQI, you follow a simple path:
1. Design the type of system you will build.
2. Assess quality.
3. Use data for improvement.
4. Measure change.
5. Repeat steps 2–4 annually.
For program staff, the YPQI begins with a look at their own program. Through program self-assessment, staff consider their own program strengths and areas for improvement. The system provides aligned services — coaching and targeted training — to maximize improvement.
For more information, please call 734-961-6900 or by e-mail at youth@highscope.org.
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