Our Projects

Oregon Reminders is a mobile health (mHealth) program that provides a private, secure way for people to set their own health reminders, created in partnership with the Oregon Health Authority.

By visiting OregonReminders.org, Oregonians can sign up for reminder messages and health tips via text, email, or voice messages. Oregon Reminders is free and confidential. Users can easily customize the frequency or content of their reminders to suit their medical needs. In 2020, Oregon Reminders will offer condom delivery and content in Spanish. YTH Initiative has led this work since 2012. YTH Initiative manages the content development, message dissemination, and marketing efforts for Oregon Reminders.

PrEPTECH, an online program and research study, is an integrated tech approach to increasing pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) uptake among young gay and bisexual men. In 2012, the US Food and Drug Administration approved daily oral pre-exposure prophylaxis medication to prevent HIV infection in high-risk individuals, which offered a unique opportunity to curb the rising incidence of HIV infection in high-risk groups, particularly among young men who have sex with men (YMSM).

Working closely with the community, YTH co-designed the PrEPTECH online web program to support the uptake and adherence of PrEP, while allowing users to bypass many of the barriers related to stigma, discrimination, and access. The multisite study aims to evaluate the PrEPTECH online program, and provide important PrEP access and care to a variety of community members including young gay and bisexual men, adolescents and transgender women.

ETR is serving as the external evaluator for a project led by Cabrillo College. The goal is to develop and revise key STEM curricula to infuse content and resources related to environmental sustainability and to develop/pilot student-centered services that promote STEM success, persistence, degree completion, and transfer.

In partnership with the American Psychological Association (APA) and an iPsyNet (international psychology network for LGBTI issues) core team, ETR led a process to design a skill-building training titled Increasing Active Support for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning and Intersex People (LGBTQI) and Building Personal Resiliency: A Workshop for Human Rights Activists. The target population for the learning process includes 1) psychologists and other similar professionals and 2) human rights workers/LGBTQI community activists.

Considering input and data shared by the core team from their respective sites (South Africa, the Philippines, and the U.S), and using ETR's Design for Learning process, the team created a comprehensive, interactive, one-day training design to support activists in assessing strategies for supporting LGBTQI people and in building resiliency for the activist. The one-day training includes the following components: 1) identifying strategies for supporting LGBTI people; 2) assessing and refining strategies; 3) planning for action; and 4) strategies for activist self-care and resiliency. Training materials include a detailed training design, participant handouts, and a facilitator's guide.

With support from the World Bank and the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI), ZonaSegura is a trauma-informed youth-centered innovative mobile solution to address teen dating violence in Honduras. Led by YTH, in partnership with GOJoven Honduras and the Public Health Institute's (PHI) GOJoven International Program, this project aims to prevent teen dating violence (TDV) through provision of prevention information, healthy relationship education, and geo-location linkage to TDV services and resources. ZonaSegura leverages the high rates of mobile phone usage among young women and girls (YWG) and men and boys (YMB) ages 14-19 in Honduras to assist them in overcoming individual and structural barriers to accessing rights-based and gender-sensitive TDV prevention information and services.

ETR was awarded a Personal Responsibility Education Innovative Strategies Program grant from the Family & Youth Services Bureau to refine and evaluate a relationships-based program called About Us. About Us is an innovative intervention that draws on developmental neuroscience principles to support young people in exploring and developing healthy romantic relationships and using condoms and highly effective contraceptives if having sex. ETR has partnered with the California School-Based Health Alliance to implement About Us in school-based health centers located in rural or suburban counties in California.. The evaluation is being conducted by Dr. Eric Walsh-Buhi and his team from the Department of Applied Health Science in the School of Public Health at Indiana University - Bloomington. This study fills several significant gaps in the field with its unique content focus, brain-based pedagogical strategies, and delivery in school-based health centers. If effective, About Us would be among the first targeted evidence-based healthy relationships sexual health interventions available for adolescents in school-based health centers.

ETR is serving as external evaluator of CHLA’s adaptation of Project AIM for teen moms. AIM 4 Teen Moms is an individualized intervention for teen moms age 15-19 with one child between the ages of 1 and 7 months. It includes 7 one-on-one sessions in the teen’s home and 2 group sessions. The evaluation is an individual level randomized controlled trial that includes a baseline, 12-month, 24-month, and 36-month survey administered via an audio computer assisted interview (ACASI). ETR successfully recruited 950 teens for participation in the study. The 12-month follow-up rate was 85% and 24-month is running at more than 80%.

ETR was funded by the CDC to develop, implement and evaluate All4You!, a 2-component intervention (behavioral skills and community involvement/service learning) for youth in alternative schools with a high rate of sexual risk behaviors. The program was successful in reducing selected sexual risk-taking behaviors at 6 months.

With funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, ETR developed, implemented and evaluated the individual and combined effects of interventions that featured a skills- and norms-based curriculum, All4You2!, and/or service learning. The study involved youth in continuation schools. Results show modest short-term impacts of the skills-based curriculum, but not the service-learning or the combined service-learning/curriculum intervention.

AMAZE harnesses the power of digital media to provide young adolescents around the globe with medically accurate, age-appropriate, affirming, and honest sex education they can access directly online—regardless of where they live or what school they attend.

AMAZE also strives to assist adults—parents, guardians, educators and health care providers around the globe—to communicate effectively and honestly about sex and sexuality with the children and adolescents in their lives.

The goal of this project is to systematically analyze and summarize research on the benefits of computer game programming for children. In the last decade, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of tools and opportunities for children and young adults to learn to program computer games, but no accumulation of knowledge about what children learn, the best pedagogical strategies, and which tools and learning environments promote different kinds of outcomes, and for whom. The methodology will use an integrative approach, specifically a meta-synthesis, which is an interpretive integration of qualitative and quantitative research findings based on a systematic literature search and analysis process. The study will go through seven steps, and a panel of content and methodology experts will evaluate the rigor and transparency at each step of the analysis process. The results will be written up and shared with three audiences: academic researchers, educators and program developers, and funders.

This project is building technical education pathways that motivate and prepare rural, high school students from underrepresented groups to enter and stay on information and communications technology (ICT) pathways. It involves two key strategies: building strong, sustainable partnerships across high schools, community colleges, and employers, and infusing ICT skills into digital media high school classes and aligning them with college classes and workforce needs. This “stealth recruitment” approach is in contrast to most efforts that take a marketing approach that tries to convince students of the value of ICT classes; instead it leverages students’ interests in digital media and contextualizes their learning. Read more >>

With the rapid rise of coding boot camps promising training that leads directly to lucrative jobs, industry has more options for finding trained employees to fill software development jobs. However, it is not well understood who attends these boot camps and how the training they offer aligns with workforce needs. This study—a collaborative work with the College of Charleston—investigates what skills and knowledge both coding boot camps and university computer science programs offer to their students and how these align with the skills and knowledge that employers seek in newly minted software developers.

ETR is serving as the external evaluation for a multi-institutional project that employs Evidence-Centered Design (ECD) principles to design and develop a collaborative, computational STEM (C2STEM) learning environment. C2STEM employs a learning-by-modeling paradigm that combines visual programming with domain specific modeling languages (DSMLs) to promote synergistic learning of discipline-specific (e.g., physics, marine biology) and computer science (computational thinking) concepts and practices.

This project primarily addresses the following priority population(s): American Indian and Low Income American Indian populations.California's Clean Air Project (CCAP) will work in the following geographical communities: Statewide in the 33 counties where American Indian populations reside. CCAP shares the belief of the State and many others working in tobacco control: All workers should have the right to be protected from the dangers of SHS in their workplaces. Read more >>

This study aims to understand the conditions under which pair programming can foster the kind of thinking and problem solving that will prepare middle school students to pursue and persist in computing fields. The design experiment involves 80 girls and boys from a range of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds who are enrolled in game programming classes. Read more >>

ETR coordinated and developed capacity-building services for 27 CDC-funded non-government organizations (NGOs) serving a range of constituents, including juvenile justice providers, service providers to runaway/homeless youth, and state and local education agencies. In collaboration with DASH staff, ETR developed and conducted a comprehensive needs assessment process to inform an annual calendar of CBA events, in the form of multi- and single-day trainings, roundtable discussions, webinars and workshops addressing both content and functions.