Jessica Newman

Jessica Newman is a senior researcher who leads research, evaluation, and capacity-building initiatives in collaboration with a variety of national, state, and local entities. Her work is primarily focused on positive youth development in out-of-school time and informal learning settings like afterschool, summer learning, and youth sports. Newman is driven by her work in translating research and evaluation into practice and then using practice to drive research and evaluation. She currently leads multiple mixed-methods applied research and evaluation projects, including a multiyear implementation study of the Additional Days School Year summer learning effort in Texas, and a national implementation study of the Million Coaches Challenge.

Newman has partnered to provide ongoing consultation, evaluation materials, and professional development resources with youth-serving programs and intermediary organizations including the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, Every Hour Counts, Higher Achievement, National AfterSchool Association, NatureBridge, New York City Department of Youth and Community Development, and YMCA of the USA. She is the coauthor of the fourth edition of Beyond the Bell®: A Toolkit for Creating Effective Afterschool and Expanded Learning Programs and has authored multiple chapters and presentations on the out-of-school time field. She also leads the development of AIR’s Ready suite of tools and resources, including the Ready to Implement toolkit for out-of-school time practitioners and has authored multiple tools to build evaluation capacity for out-of-school time staff, including the brief series, Recognizing the Role of Research and Evidence in Out-of-School Time.