PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY EDUCATION PROGRAM: PROMISING YOUTH PROGRAMS (PREP PYP)

Mathematica Inc., Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

The Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) Promising Youth Programs (PYP) project is supporting grantee-led evaluations and developing curricula for underserved youth populations. The first component of the project is providing training and technical assistance to grantee-led evaluations, called local evaluations, of second-generation cohorts of State PREP, Tribal PREP, and PREIS grantees. Prior to and during the grant competitions, the project is supporting grant applicants to propose brief evaluation plans in their applications; and during the first few months after award, PYP is supporting grant awardees to submit full evaluation plans which meet the standards for rigor. After full evaluation plans are approved, the project supports evaluations through a Community of Learning, group training, and one-on-one evaluation-focused technical assistance. Toward the end of each grant, PYP will assist grantees with developing strong analysis plans, as well as reporting and disseminating final results. For the second component, PYP will oversee a process to develop new, or revise existing, curricula to address the sexual health (and other PREP-related) needs of targeted youth populations. The project will use existing data to strategically identify target populations for new/revised curricula, and will collect data - including qualitative interviews from members of the targeted populations - in order to determine appropriate approaches for the targeted populations, based on key theories of change. PYP will then engage curriculum developer(s) in developing new/revised curricula that incorporate the new approaches. Afterwards, PYP will identify organizations to implement the new/revised curricula, and will collect implementation-related data to determine successes/challenges. Pending results, the ACF Family and Youth Services Bureau will package the curricula for dissemination. A contract was awarded to Mathematica Policy Research to conduct this project.