This Research-Practice partnership is a collaboration between Pajaro Valley Unified School District, Digital NEST, Cabrillo College, and Education, Training, Research. The goal is to strengthen, connect, and expand existing efforts to increase the number of Latinx students who enter and stay on a path to computer information systems (CIS) at a community college and the workforce.
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 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.
Adolescent Preventive Health Initiative (APHI) is a CDPH-driven initiative that strives to improve access, utilization, and quality of adolescent preventive healthcare statewide. The collaborative framework that drives, guides, and sustains this initiative focuses on enhancing communications, coordination and collaboration across CDPH programs and with external stakeholders engaged in promoting adolescent health priorities in California. ETR’s YTHI is a key partner in this effort with the main task of developing the framework and building a communications platform to facilitate cross-sector and cross-program collaboration.
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.
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.
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.
