The Harvard Family Research Project separated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to become the Global Family Research Project as of January 1, 2017. It is no longer affiliated with Harvard University.
Select a category below to narrow the list of publications about early childhood education. For the definition of each category, click here. If you are looking for a specific document, topic, or author, visit our Publications & Resources section to conduct an advanced search.
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Innovative Models to Guide Family Support and Education Policy in the 1990s: An Analysis of Four Pioneering State Programs
This research study evaluates and analyzes state initiatives in Missouri, Minnesota, Connecticut, and Maryland to support parents and early childhood. Lessons learned and evaluation methodologies are presented.
Early Head Start: Further Lessons
Catherine Ayoub and Barbara Pan, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, describe their work collecting and analyzing longitudinal data to supplement national findings from the Early Head Start study.
Alternative Designs for Community-Based Research: Pittsburgh’s Early Childhood Initiative
Stephen Bagnato, Robert Grom, and Leon Haynes describe an evaluation design that provides scientific rigor in a community setting.
SPARKing Innovation
Tony Berkley of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation describes the application of a theory of change to a complex initiative to facilitate team learning, strategic management, and program improvement.
Community Collaboration 90806: A Partnership to Increase School Readiness in Long Beach
Marielle Bohan-Baker describes the instructive and collaborative approach to planning and evaluation of six community partners in Long Beach, California.
Continuous Improvement: Being Responsive When There is Need for Change
Deborah J. Brown, external evaluator for Save the Children, discusses how continuous improvement processes have helped strengthen one of Save the Children’s language development and pre-literacy programs, Early Steps to School Success.
Rethinking the Evaluation of Family Strengthening Strategies: Beyond Traditional Program Evaluation Models
Charles Bruner of the Child and Family Policy Center outlines three factors of good family strengthening programs that evaluators are not adequately measuring in their evaluations.
North Carolina's Smart Start Initiative: A Decade of Evaluation Lessons
Donna Bryant and Karen Ponder describe the past 10 years of evaluating North Carolina's nationally recognized early childhood initiative.
Identifying School Readiness Indicators to Stimulate Policy Action
Elizabeth Burke Bryant and Catherine Walsh, of Rhode Island Kids Count, give an account of the School Readiness Indicators Initiative.
Advocating for the Rights of Undocumented Families
Moria Cappio and Melanie Reyes from The Children’s Aid Society share their experiences reinventing family engagement strategies in their East Harlem Early Head Start/Head Start program to reach out to immigrant families by including parent civic advocacy. Cappio and Reyes also describe how using an advocacy evaluation tool helped them navigate these uncharted waters.
Framing Program Evaluation: Why We Should Tinker With Theories of Change and Logic Models
While evaluation needs may vary, all organizations can benefit from utilizing theory-based evaluation tools to frame evaluation efforts. This article explores how three organizations developed their program’s theory of change and logic model.
Learning for All: The Value of Field Experience in Training a New Generation of Program Evaluators
Field experience in evaluation inquiry is a promising approach to preparing the next generation of evaluators. Learn what one group of student consultants and organizations did to make a field experience in evaluative inquiry a positive one.
Teaching the Teachers: Preparing Educators to Engage Families for Student Achievement
Harvard Family Research Project and the National PTA® have teamed up to bring you the third brief in our ground-breaking series about family engagement policy, highlighting the need for teacher education programs to prepare teachers to better work with families.
Lessons From Family-Strengthening Interventions: Learning From Evidence-Based Practice
Examine how effective family-strengthening interventions can positively impact families and children in this practitioner-friendly brief from Harvard Family Research Project. Lessons From Family-Strengthening Interventions: Learning From Evidence-Based Practice is based on our review of interventions that have been rigorously evaluated through experimental and quasi-experimental studies. We offer educators, service providers, and evaluators recommendations for creating successful programs and evaluations.
Engaging Families in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Project-Based Learning
To be successful, children need a strong science, technology, engineering, and math foundation. Learn how Iridescent, a project funded in part by the National Science Foundation, connects families, engineers, and children to develop these skills early on in school.
Examining the Efficacy of Two Models of Preschool Professional Development in Language and Literacy
Nancy Clark-Chiarelli from Education Development Center, Inc. describes an evaluation of two approaches to early literacy professional development—one with a traditional face-to-face mode of delivery and one with a technology-enhanced component.
Evaluation Based on Theories of the Policy Process
Harvard Family Research Project explains how it helps to ground evaluation in theories of the policy process.
Grantmaking to School Districts: Lessons for Foundations
This brief offers lessons and best practices from foundations across the country on grantmaking to school districts. It offers advice to foundations that are considering school district investments for the first time. It also offers a useful "check" to more experienced foundations that want to examine their thinking and approaches against the lessons and practices of other foundations.
The Build Initiative: An Evaluation of State-Level System-Building Efforts
Barbara Gebhard of Build describes the initiative's interactive evaluation approach.
Parents as Agents of Change
In this Leading the Field profile, Sandra Gutierrez, national director of the Latino family-focused Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors program, shares her vision of how families are fundamental to transforming the lives of our children and our communities. [Este artículo también está disponible en español como Padres de Familia como Agentes de Cambio.]
Family Involvement News: September 2013
We are committed to keeping you up to date on what's new in family engagement. View our list of links to current reports, articles, resources, and events in the field.
Helping Head Start and Early Head Start Programs Create a Culture That Embraces Data
A new interactive online learning module, Data in Head Start and Early Head Start: Creating a Culture that Embraces Data, developed by the National Center on Program Management and Fiscal Operations, helps Head Start/Early Head Start leaders understand how to use data to inform their decision making.
Making Data Come Alive for Families through Young Children’s Play
Amy Horenbeck, training director from the Tools of the Mind program based at the Center for Improving Early Learning at the Metropolitan State College of Denver in Colorado, discusses a different approach to early childhood education and using children's work as a unique type of student data to track development and share children's progress with parents.
Designing Quality Assessment Tools in Early Childhood Education and Youth Development
Ted Jurkiewicz and Charles Hohmann from the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation describe the design of High/Scope's new Youth Program Quality Assessment tool.
Closing the Achievement Gap: Head Start and Beyond
Ed Zigler, Ron Haskins, and G. Reid Lyon discuss the past and future of Head Start, the country's first federally funded early childhood program.