Success for Kids (SFK) began working with a small number of schools in Los Angeles six years ago and has since grown rapidly to operate programs in New York, Miami, and Las Vegas, as well as internationally in London, Mexico City, Panama, Israel, and Malawi. It currently serves approximately 7,000 children worldwide. Through its 10-week level 1 course, SFK uses a nonreligious, nondenominational curriculum to teach children how to access inner resources and build positive connections with others.

Despite the program’s rapid expansion, fueled by growing international support, program effects have been documented only informally through testimonials. This study was...

The mission of SFK is “to empower kids to lead happy and productive lives by providing them with a sense of purpose and the recognition that they have the power to impact the course and direction of their lives.” The philosophy underlying this mission is that resilience, or the ability to overcome adverse circumstances in daily life, is a universal quality, rather than a quality that only some children possess. The program is not a religious program; rather, it teaches children to access inner resources and build positive connections with others.

The level 1 SFK course, titled “The Game of...

An estimated 7 million U.S. children spend some period after school with no adult supervision, putting them at risk for negative academic and behavioral outcomes. But children can benefit when they engage in structured out-of-school-time activities. How much and in what ways, however, is an open question: Most reviews of out-of-school-time programs have focused on academic benefits, show mixed results, and are not rigorous (Durlak and Weissberg, 2007). This may be because the programs themselves vary greatly in quality and participation rates. Given the large financial backing for out-of-school-time programs, stakeholders are increasingly interested in knowing whether the programs are...

Our research design takes advantage of a unique window of opportunity: During late 2006, the SFK program was rapidly expanding to different existing after-school programs in southeast Florida. This dramatic growth enabled us to randomly assign the 19 participating after-school–program sites to “immediate” implementation of SFK programming and “delayed” implementation after an approximately 12-week waiting period. This is similar to using a “wait-list” control group. During the waiting period, the delayed-implementation sites formed a control group for the immediate-intervention sites.

Figure 4.1 illustrates how the design was implemented. In the fall of 2006, sites in group 1 and group...

Before turning to the outcome analysis, we undertake an examination of data quality. This is particularly important in the context of primary data collection and is essential for understanding how much weight should be placed on the results presented in Chapter Six. We use two methods to assess data quality. The first uses Cronbach’s alpha to assess the reliability or internal consistency of each measurement scale, and the second uses indexes formed of special items embedded in the BASC-2 questionnaire that are designed to flag invalid response patterns.

Because the BASC-2 is a published instrument, reliability has been extensively analyzed...

In this chapter, we describe our estimation methods and results. We estimate the following model separately for each outcome in our data. Let$y_{ist}$be an outcome for childiin sitesat timet= 1,2,3 (respectively denoting pretest, posttest, and follow-up). To estimate pre- and post-TEs, we regress$y_{ist}$on main effects and an interaction between a treatment-group indicator$T_{ist}$and a posttest indicatorI(t= 2), a set of indicator variables for each site$D_{s}$(i.e., site-level fixed effects), and a vector of individual-level covariates$X_{ist}$, as shown in Equation 6.1:$y_{ist}=\left ( T_{ist}\times I\left ( t=2 \right ) \right )\theta+T_{ist}\delta+I\left ( t=2 \right )\gamma+D_{s}\lambda+X_{ist}\beta+\varepsilon_{ist}.\quad \caption{(6.1)}$

The parameterθ...

Based on the evidence presented here, we conclude that the SFK level 1 course had significant positive effects on the children in our study. The program positively affected virtually every domain covered by the BASC-2 assessment instrument, with ESs that ranged from small to large. While the program affected both clinical and adaptive behaviors, it had especially large effects on adaptive behaviors. This suggests that the program is an effective tool for both primary and secondary prevention.

In analyses not presented, we also examined whether effects for the treatment group varied with particular SFK teachers, controlling for site indicators and...