Chapter 10: Building Effective Continuous Quality Improvement Systems: The Need for Evaluative Thinking About Out-of-School Time Program Quality

In this chapter, we discuss why evaluative thinking should be an essential component to Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) frameworks and offer suggestions about how to establish and plan CQI systems that explicitly encourage evaluative thinking. We begin by discussing the complexities inherent in the construct of “program quality” and how existing CQI systems may fall short when responding to this complexity, especially if evaluative thinking is not made explicit during the process. Next, we define evaluative thinking, and discuss how we integrate it into CQI plans for out-of-school time (OST) programs. We then offer five comprehensive strategies that we regularly use when developing CQI plans that leverage evaluative thinking, drawing on our 20 years of experience evaluating OST programs. We conclude the chapter with our lessons learned and discuss recommendations for the OST field.