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March | April 2015

Building the Evidence Base: OJJDP Evaluates Delinquency Prevention Models

A tutor and student in Match Education's high-intensity math tutoring program, currently being evaluated in Chicago by the University of Chicago Crime Lab. Photo by Robert Kozloff/The University of Chicago.
A tutor and student in Match Education's high-intensity math tutoring program, currently being evaluated in Chicago by the University of Chicago Crime Lab. Photo by Robert Kozloff/The University of Chicago.
Through the funding of rigorous evaluation efforts, OJJDP is growing the body of evidence regarding effective delinquency prevention programs for youth. Between March 23 and 26, 2015, Barbara Tatem Kelley and Keith Towery of OJJDP’s Innovation and Research Division conducted a site-monitoring visit to the University of Chicago Crime Lab. The purpose of the visit was to learn more about two promising OJJDP-supported evaluation efforts—the One Summer Jobs Plus (OSP) and Becoming a Man (BAM)/Match Math Tutoring evaluations.

Youth growing up in Chicago face many challenges, particularly those who reside in neighborhoods characterized by high rates of unemployment, school failure, school dropout, and crime and delinquency. The city serves as a real-life testing ground for program approaches that target the risk factors adolescents face.

A key evaluation question is whether these youth-focused prevention models will be cost effective enough to be replicated and implemented on a large scale in other localities. Although the evidence is still being collected and analyzed under the OJJDP-supported evaluations, the initial findings seem promising.

One Summer Jobs Plus

Along with daily mentor support, OSP offers students 8 weeks of part-time summer employment at Illinois minimum wage ($8.25). Each job mentor works with approximately 10 youth to guide them on how to be successful employees and navigate the challenges to employment. Half of the treatment group also participates in cognitive-behavioral training, which focuses on social-emotional learning to help students better understand and manage their emotional and behavioral responses and increase success in employment.

Unlike most evaluated employment programs that are high cost and focused on adult subjects already grappling with employment difficulties, the evaluation of OSP focuses on a short-term (8 weeks), relatively low-cost intervention on a population not often subjected to rigorous evaluation efforts—adolescents still enrolled in school. One of the evaluation goals is to determine whether OSP will prevent violence and contribute to social-emotional learning during and after summer employment. The test of this program was run during the summer of 2012.

The results were encouraging. According to the co-principal investigator, Sara B. Heller, the program significantly decreased violent arrests by 43 percent over 16 months, with 3.95 fewer violent crime arrests per 100 youth. This violent crime arrest decline occurred largely after the 8-week intervention ended. The effects appeared to be fairly similar between the jobs only and jobs plus social-emotional learning treatment conditions. The evaluation is ongoing.

Youth Guidance's Becoming A Man program, currently being evaluated in Chicago by the University of Chicago Crime Lab. Photo by Robert Kozloff/The University of Chicago.
Youth Guidance's Becoming A Man program, currently being evaluated in Chicago by the University of Chicago Crime Lab. Photo by Robert Kozloff/The University of Chicago.

Becoming a Man/Match Math Tutoring

The BAM curriculum was developed by Youth Guidance as an in-school, dropout- and violence-prevention program for at-risk male students in secondary school. It addresses six core values: integrity, accountability, self-determination, positive anger expression, visionary goal setting, and respect for womanhood. Students are guided by a group facilitator to learn and practice impulse control, emotional self-regulation, recognition of social cues and interpreting the intentions of others, raising aspirations for the future, and developing a sense of personal responsibility and integrity. The BAM approach has been recognized by the White House as an example of innovation in advancing the goals of the My Brother’s Keeper initiative for minority males.

The Match Math tutoring approach was initially developed by Match Education of Boston as a low-cost and high-dosage tutoring approach. In contrast to the typical math classroom where one teacher is instructing a large group, Match Math pairs one tutor with two students during a daily tutoring session. Tutors assess and address each student’s math foundational development and current math class learning objectives, and communicate weekly with students’ parents and math class teachers to further align tutoring with class content. A site director is responsible for handling behavior issues in the tutoring room, communicating with school staff, and providing daily feedback and professional guidance to the tutors. OJJDP research staff visited 3 of the participating 12 Chicago public high schools to observe BAM/Match Math in action.

The evaluation team’s preliminary findings show positive outcomes for boys participating in Match Math only as well as for those in Match Math with BAM, including significant increases in math achievement scores, a 50-percent reduction in math course failures, and a reduction in failures in non-math courses. The evaluation is ongoing. Future analysis will include assessment of academic gains; behavioral/disciplinary reports from schools; official arrest records, with an emphasis on whether program youth display reductions in violence; and comparison of the impact of BAM only, Match Math only, BAM with Match, and the control condition.

Resources:

For more on the OSP evaluation findings, read the Science article “Summer Jobs Reduce Youth Violence Among Disadvantaged Youth.”

For additional details about BAM/Match Math, read “Not Too Late: Improving Academic Outcomes for Disadvantaged Youth.”