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Policy‐makers are looking to after‐school programmes to improve family and child wellbeing and are searching for evidence‐based ways to improve the quality of after‐school programmes. This study examines whether the Good Behaviour Game, a behaviour management curriculum designed for school classrooms, can be easily migrated to academically focused after‐school programmes. Our results are based on programme observations, qualitative interviews and ratings of implementation fidelity. We describe the structure and activities in these after‐school programmes and then identify challenges to implementing and evaluating classroom‐based interventions in the after‐school setting.

The 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend that children consume at least three daily servings of whole grains. Data from a pilot after‐school program indicated that graham snacks, containing 5 g whole wheat per serving, were consumed in the range of 73‐88 percent, similar to the refined grain counterpart. This paper aims to examine whether a full serving (16 g) of whole grain delivered in a graham snack is acceptable as tested among children participating in an after‐school snack program.

Subjects included ∼100 children (grades K‐6) participating in after‐school snack programs. Over eight weeks, children were offered graham snacks containing 5, 8, 12, and 16 g whole wheat flour per 30 g serving. Plate waste was used to measure graham snack consumption, as children placed their unfinished snacks in a receptacle and waste was measured after each session. At week nine, a subgroup of children participated in taste tests and rated each snack for liking on a nine‐point hedonic scale. Another subgroup was enrolled in group interviews to provide input about their perceptions of the products' quality and suggestions for improvement.

Consumption for the 5, 8, 12, and 16 g graham snacks was 80, 76, 79, and 80 percent, respectively. The taste tests results showed no significant difference in rating of the four‐graham snacks. The focus groups indicated that overall, the products are well‐liked, particularly for texture.

This paper suggests that graham snacks can contribute a significant dietary source, nearly one full serving of whole grain when offered in children's natural environment through an after‐school snack program.

This policy review paper is an analysis of the Double Reduction Policy (DRP) of China that was promulgated in July 2021. It looks into its rationale as well as different stakeholders' early reactions to the policy.

Critical policy analysis (CPA) method was used to identify (1) the artefacts, such as language, objects and acts, that were significant carriers of the DRP; (2) communities of meaning, interpretation, speech and practice that are relevant to the DRP and its implementation; (3) the local discourses relevant to the DRP; and (4) the tension points and their conceptual sources (affective, cognitive and/or moral) by different DRP stakeholders. As per the comparative education field, this paper compares the pre-DRP and post-DRP periods to tease out how the policy affects different stakeholders of education.

The DRP in China could be attributed to diverse factors such as demography, socialist economic and developmental visions and manpower structure. The implementation of the DRP has generated uneven reactions among different stakeholders and geographical regions both in speed and scale. While education stakeholders have no choice but to adopt the policy, they face challenges derived from a sudden halt of private educational resources and subsequent increased duties of parents and schools.

The significance of this early policy analysis lies in offering an insight into education development in China by analysing and deliberating the DRP from different perspectives.

This paper aims to examine tensions around play, performance and artmaking as becoming in the mix of expected and taken-for-granted discourses implicit in an after-school ceramics makerspace (Perry and Medina, 2011). The authors look closely at one adolescent girl’s embodied performance to see how it ruptures the scripts for compliant bodies in the after-school program. While these performances take place out-of-school and in an arts studio, the tensions and explorations also resonate with broader issues around student embodied, performative and becomings that run counter to normalized school expectations.

A contemporary approach to nexus analysis (Medina and Wohlwend, 2014; Wohlwend, 2021) unpacked two critical performative encounters (Medina and Perry, 2011) using concepts of historical bodies (Scollon and Scollon, 2004) informed by sociomaterial thing-power (Bennett, 2010).

Playing while painting pottery collides and converges with the tacitly desired and expected ways of embodying student in this after-school artspace. Emily’s outer-space alien persona ruptured expected discourses when her historical body and embodied performances threatened other children. While her embodied performances facilitated her becoming a fully present participant in the studio, she fractured the line between play and reality in violent ways.

As literacy researchers, the authors are in a moment of reckoning where student embodied performances and historical bodies can collide with all-too-real violent threats in daily lives and community locations. Situating these performances in the nexus of embodied literacies, unsanctioned play and thing-power can help educators respond to these moments as ruptures of tacit expectations for girlhoods in school-like spaces.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the marketing opportunities for after-school educational services in the Chinese context by examining children’s perceptions of intelligence using visual methodology.

Altogether 30 Chinese children aged 9–12 studying in grades four to six were asked to draw what comes to mind for two statements: “This is an intelligent child” and “This is a child of average intelligence.” After doing the drawings, the children were interviewed face-to-face to answer questions about the personalities and social relationships of the children depicted in the two drawings that they had produced.

A child described as intelligent was imagined wearing glasses, studying hard and obtaining excellent academic results. A child described as of average intelligence was imagined as having many friends, playing a lot and experiencing tension with parents over studies. Participants had a restrictive view of intelligence and associated intelligence with academic success. They endorsed both a growth mindset and a fixed mindset of intelligence. On the one hand, they endorsed a growth mindset of intelligence as they associated intelligence with personal efforts and practices. On the other hand, participants endorsed a fixed mindset of intelligence as they tended to avoid challenges and appeared to be threatened by the success of others. Participants imagined that an intelligent child would experience poor relationships with friends.

The findings were based on a nonprobability small sample. The study did not investigate the socialization process of such perceptions.

Educational services and nonschool activity service providers can position themselves as agents to help students develop meta-analytical skills in embracing challenging tasks. Marketers can develop courses and learning materials that teach children different learning strategies. They can use incentives to encourage persistence and resilience in meeting challenges. This study uncovered the emotional and social needs of intelligent children. A new market segment was identified that targets children with high intelligence. Educational service providers can design curricula and activities to support high-performing children in developing empathy and good communication skills. Educators can assist those who perform well academically to nurture genuine friendships and improve social relations with peers.

The prevalence of the private tutoring industry in the Chinese context may introduce educational disparity, as families with low resources will not be able to afford these services. Nonprofit organizations can provide similar educational services at a low cost to bridge the gap. The narrow view of intelligence expressed by participants, and their lack of awareness of the wide range of types of intelligence, indicates that education service providers can develop the confidence of a child with average intelligence through appreciation of his or her unique talents beyond academic achievements.

This study explores attributes associated with intelligence among Chinese children using an innovative visual method. The marketing implications can apply to other societies where the after-school tuition market is prevalent.

This article explores, identifies and conceptualises everyday audiobook reading practices amongst young adults.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten Swedish audiobook users aged 18–19. The material was analysed using qualitative content analysis and focused on their audiobook use during an average weekday, as this was the time that they listened the most. The theoretical framework consists of theories on practice, time and everyday routine.

Five timespaces emerged when audiobook practices were most prevalent: morning routines, commuting routines, school routines, after school routines and bedtime routines. Within these timespaces, several practices could be identified and conceptualised. Three mobile practices were commute listening, exercise listening and chore listening while more stationary practices were homework listening, schoolwork listening and leisure listening. An unexpected finding was how audiobooks routinely were used to aid respondents’ wellbeing. This wellbeing listening was used to alleviate stress, loneliness and help listeners relax or fall asleep. Furthermore, respondents switch between Music, Audiobooks and Podcasts, which is conceptualised as MAP-switching.

There is a scarcity of research on audiobook use, and this paper contributes with new knowledge on audiobook reading practices, how audiobooks fit into everyday routine and provides concepts to aid further research on audiobook practices.

The purpose of this paper is to first provide an overview of children's spending power, media exposure, and identification with brand names in the usa along with an updated overview of the major findings in the consumer socialization literature, and to then provide an empirical explanation of how the consumer socialization process works with today's children.

Based on a survey administered to 663 children, a factor analysis was performed on items designed to measure young people's attitudes toward, and interaction with, the various consumer socialization agents and marketplace factors, including shopping and media usage behavior.

Five major consumer socialization influence factors emerged: irrational social influence, importance of television, familial influence, shopping importance, and brand importance; and were used as dependent variables in subsequent analyses looking at the effects of a number of independent variables. Results indicate that the relative impacts of the various consumer socialization influence factors do vary according to the child's gender, age, amount of spending money available, amount of television viewing, and how he/she spends time after school.

These results are important to practitioners because they show that the traditional consumer socialization models may apply differently to children with different demographics and lifestyle characteristics.

This study aims to explore how youth poets wrote in a community of practice and how their out-of-school poetry writing contributed toward developing disciplinary literacy.

In this qualitative case study, the authors studied youth’s writing by drafting narrative field notes, collecting student writing and process drawings and interviewing participants.

The authors found that the poets in this study maintained ownership of their writing and engaged in writing processes in ways that reflected Behizadeh’s (2019) conception of authenticity as writing that connects both to students’ experiences, and to the purposes and audiences of their writing context.

This out-of-school context provides implications for how English Language Arts teachers can rethink what disciplinary literacy looks like in classroom writing instruction.

By maintaining ownership of their writing, the youth agentively positioned themselves not only as students accumulating disciplinary knowledge but also as participants in a community of practice.

This paper aims to reviews the structure and format of an after school incubator program that leverages online games for literacy learning, particularly for adolescent males. It also aims to describe its dual function as both quasi‐natural context and design experiment laboratory and to discuss some early findings that illustrate the kinds of literacy practices the authors are beginning to see within their homegrown community to date.

For the past year, the authors have been engaging game‐loving boys in digital and print literacy practices, not by playing matchmaker between them and those game communities that engage in such practices naturally, but by growing such a community of their own. Following the lead of other games‐based educational programs and known characteristics of game‐related indigenous online communities, the design encourages distributed expertise and collective intelligence in place of standardization and peer‐to‐peer learning in the form of modeling and networked apprenticeship.

The goal is to leverage teenage boys' existing interests in games to strengthen and enrich their engagement in literacies with payoff both in school and beyond. The findings suggest that the laboratory has met with initial success, particularly in terms of the use of literacy as a tool for solving problems, researching and assembling online multimodal game‐related resources, and synthesizing in‐game and out‐of‐game information.

There are challenges inherent to taking this sort of “piggyback” approach to literacy learning, yet some characteristics that emerge from such approaches warrant further investigation. Specifically, virtual worlds enable what we call “networked apprenticeship” and function as “levelers” in their ability to let mastery rather than credentials decide who is considered expert in any given situated interaction. Such social contexts for learning, despite the challenges of fostering them, warrant additional research.

While previous literature has blamed videogames as the culprit behind boys' lagging success in literacy‐related coursework and assessments, this program inverts this equation and instead investigates the ways in which games can function as a sort of “gateway drug” for important digital literacy practices.

The paper focuses on a program whose target audience is adolescent boys identified as “at risk” and failing in literacy‐related classes yet highly motivated by games.