- Program Education
- Program Area Advancing Afterschool
- Grant Amount $400,000
- Grant Period December 1, 2010–December 31, 2011
- Location Brooklyn, NY, United States
- Geographic Focus United States
About this grant
This grant will support Wireless Generation in conducting necessary research and design work to develop a system to measure student performance in afterschool programs that will complement the national Common Core Standards Initiative. Building upon the latest technology and the idea that afterschool programs often bridge the public space of school and the private space of home, the overall goal of the assessment tool is to advance a student assessment system that measures 21st century skills, such as the ability to work on a team, along with core academic skills. In so doing, the tool will help incentivize greater accountability in afterschool programs and in schools for raising student performance in both academic and nonacademic areas. This grant supports the discovery phase of the project and will: 1) identify a set of afterschool partners to pilot a test version of the tool called ThirdSpace; 2) select the most appropriate metrics of 21st Century skills to include in ThirdSpace; 3) address the challenges that in-school and afterschool educators will face in implementing an afterschool assessment system; 4) develop a plan for how to build ThirdSpace, including the duration and resources necessary after the discovery phase, and how the grantee will apply its existing Honeycomb data-display technology; and 5) engage funders, states, and districts to support and invest in the development of the ThirdSpace system.