Cityspan: A Database for Providers
Managing Digital Badges
- Best Practices
- Featured Program Metrics
- Additional Program Metrics
- Organization of Activity
- Activities’ Transition Time
- Staff Positively Guide Behavior
- Youth Relations with Adults
- Youth Relations with Peers
- Space Adequacy
- Overall Socio-Emotional Environment
- Informal Time: General Staff Performance
- Informal Time: Youth Engagement and Behavior
- Youth Feel Challenged
- Supportive Adults Present
- Helps Youth Academically
- Helps Youth Socially
- Social-Emotional Skills
- Measurement
Cityspan supports program providers’ use of digital badges to reward youth participants’ growth and achievement in critical social-emotional skills. Programs participating at the Badging Membership Level, or who are interested in participating at that level, can access a variety of information, resources, and tutorials on incorporating badging into their programmatic experience.
Badges are visual representations of a young person’s learning experience that goes beyond attendance and grades—symbols of accomplishments and skills that can be learned in any number of settings across Boston. Based on Boston Beyond’s efforts over the past several years of using common measurements to assess the quality of learning opportunities throughout the city, we now offer a line of data driven, skill based, digital badges for Boston students.
Each badge is driven by data and powered by a uniform set of skill-based criteria. The criteria for earning each badge comes from a combination of our Achieve, Connect, Thrive (ACT) Framework skills and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) science & engineering practice standards. Evaluation of these skills is informed by behavioral indicators in National Institute on Out-of-School Time (NIOST)’s Survey on Academic and Youth Outcomes – Teacher version (SAYO T), a validated measurement tool that Boston Beyond, Providence After School Alliance (PASA), and our various partners have been using for several years to assess skill development.
The results of these evaluations then qualify students to earn two different badges for each competency– one for overall achievement and one for meaningful growth.
