Mary Kay Dugan is a managing technical assistant consultant at AIR. She is passionate about identifying evidence-based promising practices and translating them into policies and effective programs focused on underserved populations including disadvantaged youth and young adults. Dugan has over 30 years of experience helping federal, state, and local governments ...
Even though the coronavirus pandemic has pushed interaction, learning, and professional development to online environments, that doesn’t mean these activities can’t be just as effective as they would be in person. In this episode of AIR Informs, Melissa Rasberry and Marshal Conley discuss communities of practice and how they can ...
Senior Researcher Manolya Tanyu and her colleague Anna Barry support youth both in their careers at AIR and also as volunteer mentors to youth. In this Q&A, they discuss what they’ve learned and gained from youth-adult mentoring, how their hands-on experience affects their work, and why anyone considering becoming a ...
How can afterschool and expanded learning practitioners measure young people’s personal and social skills? How can they use that data to improve their programs and systems? To answer these questions, AIR worked with Every Hour Counts, a coalition of citywide organizations that increase access to quality learning opportunities by providing ...
Ensuring strong alignment between quality standards and afterschool programs requires creative thinking, planning, and collaboration. Afterschool programs that align professional development with quality standards can support staff learning and sustain continuous improvement by reinforcing professional standards and practices. ...
On February 23, 2023 AIR held a webinar to discuss what readiness is and why it matters, and to hear from OST leaders who are integrating readiness thinking and tools into their work. Participants had the opportunity to hear from researchers at AIR about AIR’s new, free resource, the Ready ...
Caitlin Dawkins, a principal technical assistance consultant at AIR, helped to develop the concept of Second Chance Month, with colleagues at Prison Fellowship. In this Q&A, Dawkins explains why successful reentry is hard to measure and dispels some misconceptions around reentry.
This series of monographs addresses the issues of youth with cognitive or behavioral disabilities and their experiences in the juvenile justice system. Staff in the system can better serve these children by receiving support in understanding these issues.
AIR developed a systematic, transparent, evidence-based protocol to review and translate the extant research about juvenile drug courts and related interventions into comprehensive, reasonable, actionable, understandable, and measurable guidelines.
Most research and practice in second language learning supports the theory that literacy in one language assists literacy development in another language. The reverse hypothesis also is believed to be true—a lack of literacy skills in the native language hinders literacy development in the second language. The “What Works” Study ...