Youth Central to Evaluation Efforts of Charlottesville’s Music Resource Center

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By Valerie Futch, Ph.D.

Futch is a postdoctoral fellow with Youth-Nex, studying adolescent identity development, youth-adult relationships in out-of-school programs, and emerging adulthood. She is the recent recipient of the emerging scholar award for the Out-of-School-Time Special Interest Group (OST SIG) at the 2013 American Educational Research Association AERA conference held in San Francisco.

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(JPC Scholars: Courtney Fox, Allie Cooper, Becca Christensen, William Binion)

For the past 18 months I’ve had the opportunity to work with an amazing group of researchers to conduct a program evaluation of the Music Resource Center (MRC) in Charlottesville, as well as develop a way for them to sustainably collect data in the future. This project, which brought together four high-school MRC members, four undergraduate U.Va. researchers, two staff members and two U.Va. faculty, was funded by the Jefferson Public Citizens (JPC) program at U.Va. As this work winds down, we celebrate the release of the U.Va. students’ peer-reviewed article in the JPC journal as well as their second-place finish in JPC’s recent presentation competition, which awarded $250 to the MRC for continuation of the work. Continue reading