21st Century Community Learning Center

The 21st Century Community Learning Centers are a compensatory education program of the American government. They offer the students of primary and middle schools different ways of leisure activity after school. These include sports, theater, as well as homework help. They are looked after by educators and social workers. Often there is a common food. The centers are open 4-5 days a week for three hours after school.

Objectives of the program are children a safe place after school to offer from socially disadvantaged families and to improve the academic performance of these children.

Evaluation

James Burdumy and co-workers on behalf of the U.S. Government, the effects of 21st Century Community Learning Centers. They found more negative than positive effects. They studied 2,308 students. The students were divided randomly into an intervention group ( who participated in the program) and a control group (which did not participate in the program).

It was found that the children had to be excluded from the intervention group more frequently because of discipline problems from school and needed to be addressed more often because of behavioral problems of the students their parents. There was no impact on the performance of students in mathematics, the natural sciences or the social sciences. For the group of primary school children, initially but showed very poor performances, English was a little improvement in the skills in the subject will be shown (2 points on a 100 -point scale), the rest did not improve in this compartment.

Evaluation of the study by James et al Burdumy.

The study by James Burdumy et al. has the advantage to have a large sample of 2,308 students from 26 schools and a low dropout rate, depending on the school were between 76 % to 88 % of students still in follow-up after two years. Before the intervention to the experimental group and control group did not differ with respect to the variables of interest and student performance were determined using standardized tests.

Disadvantages include the inability to blind trial and that the program first drawing children voluntarily participated in it.