In 2013, Prime Time contracted with the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to design and conduct such a youth outcome study exploring the relationship between levels of quality practice and education-related outcomes based on data obtained from the School District of Palm Beach County. More specifically, the study was designed to answer the following research question: What impact does participation in higher quality afterschool programs have on youth outcomes compared with similar youth participating in lower quality afterschool programs? This question is directly aligned with the mission of Prime Time, which is oriented toward helping lower quality afterschool programs progress to higher levels of program quality. By answering this question, Prime Time would have information about the impact on youth outcomes when students attend high-quality programs as opposed to those characterized by lower quality. To answer this research question, AIR worked with Prime Time, the Palm Beach Children's Services Council, and the School District of Palm Beach County to obtain the program quality, youth afterschool participation, and youth outcome data needed to carry out three primary tasks. 1. Assign afterschool programs served by prime time to quality profiles. A key component of the study was to develop a method to assign more than 100 afterschool programs enrolled in the QIS administered by Prime Time into different higher and lower quality profiles. The goal was to define quality profile types that were different from one another in ways that are hypothesized to have substantive ramifications for how youth engage in and benefit from afterschool programming. 2. Create meaningful comparison groups. In answering the primary research question, steps were taken to construct both a treatment and a comparison group. The treatment group was comprised of those youth attending higher quality programs that participated in afterschool programming regularly during the 2011-12 school year. The primary hypothesis guiding the proposed study is that youth who participate regularly in higher quality programs will demonstrate better functioning on a variety of youth outcomes. The comparison group was made up of similar youth attending lower quality programming. The comparison group was constructed employing a method called propensity score matching, which allowed the research team to control for selection bias in much the same way as a random assignment design would. 3. Conduct impact analyses. After the comparison groups had been created, multilevel models were run to assess the impact of participation in higher quality afterschool programming on youth outcomes compared with youth enrolled in lower quality programs. The outcomes examined include levels of school-day attendance, disciplinary referrals, grade promotion, and assessment scores in reading and mathematics. Aside from the random assignments of youth to treatment and control groups, this approach was the most robust analysis that could be undertaken to assess the impact of program participation in higher quality programs on a variety of youth outcomes. Because of the manner in which comparison groups were constructed, significant, positive effects, if found as hypothesized, could be interpreted as participation in higher quality programming causing a given outcome. This report provides a description of what steps were taken to by the research team at AIR to carry out each of these three steps, a summary of key findings, and recommendations for how study results can be used Prime Time to develop and refine its QIS and construct an internal research and evaluation agenda to explore how different levels of afterschool program quality may impact youth outcomes. (author abstract)