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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.
Harvard Family Research Project explains how it helps to ground evaluation in theories of the policy process.
Michael Scriven, author of Evaluation Thesaurus, talks about how evaluation has evolved into a discipline distinct from social science research.
$10.00 . 75 Pages.
A list of useful resources on the Internet.
Richard Rothstein argues that narrowing the achievement gap requires substantial changes in social policy in addition to extensive school reform.
Dr. Hector Garza of the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships describes what he looks for when evaluating educational partnerships.
Ricardo Millett from the Woods Fund of Chicago discusses how evaluators can build capacity by addressing issues of diversity and multiculturalism.
Juila Coffman of Harvard Family Research Project describes common qualities shared among “learning organizations,” examining them in the context of service programs.
Julia Coffman of Harvard Family Research Project wants to save you from the embarrassment of making the same mistake she made.
This paper examines how communication campaigns with different purposes (individual behavior change and policy change) have been evaluated. It offers a discussion of theories of change that can guide evaluation planning, along with five case studies of completed campaign evaluations. Each case study includes lessons from the evaluation and the paper finishes with a set of cross-case-study lessons gleaned from these evaluations and others.
Free. Available online only.
Julia Coffman of Harvard Family Research Project writes about using a logic model approach to evaluate a large and diverse foundation initiative.
A list of useful resources on the Internet.
This report presents what has been happening in the field of public communication campaign evaluation in recent years. It examines evaluation challenges, criticisms, and practice and includes sections on relevant theory, outcomes, and useful methods for designing evaluations. It ends with opportunities for the road ahead.
Free. Available online only.
This study explores the reading concepts held by urban families and how home reading practices intersect with school literacy practices.
Free. Available online only.
Betty Cooke of the Minnesota Department of Children, Families, and Learning describes Minnesota’s experiences using program staff as data collectors. Stan Schneider and Berle Mirand Driscoll from Metis Associates writes about using students as ethnographers in a study of a family resource center. Cheryl Fish-Parcham of Families USA and Theresa Shivers of United Planning Organization/Head Start write about using client families in a study of managed health care.
Students' pathways through school can be seen as moving through an academic pipeline to adulthood. The Bridging Multiple Worlds model focuses on how diverse youth, beginning in their middle childhood years, navigate across their worlds of families, peers, schools, and communities as they move along their pathways to college, careers, and family roles in adulthood.
Free. Available online only.
Teresa Boyd Cowles of the Connecticut Department of Education offers self-reflective strategies evaluators can use to enhance their multicultural competency.
D’Lisa Crain, Grant Administrator for the Nevada State Parent Information & Resource Center and Parent Involvement Coordinator for the Washoe County School District, talks about using case studies to help immigrant families better understand data as well as training parents to use an online data tool to track student learning and attendance.
This study explores the experiences of British Bangladeshi and Pakistani parents in their interactions with schools and their involvement in children’s education.
Free. Available online only.
Education reform policies place new emphasis on educational technology. Katherine McMillan Culp and Margaret Honey from the Center for Children and Technology have learned the importance of research rigor and local validity in their evaluations of educational technology.
Lois-ellin Datta of Datta Analysis points to the importance of studying control and comparison group experiences when conducting experimental studies.
This paper describes why family support is essential, given current social and economic trends, and stresses the need to bridge child care and family support. The author underscores the need for accessible family support training curricula that can be adapted to audiences of child care providers.
$7.00 . 25 Pages.
Eric Dearing, Associate Professor of Applied Developmental Psychology in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, discusses the need to use data-based evidence, rather than intuition, to create successful family and community engagement strategies.
Article in the Journal of School Psychology, 42(6), 445–460. In this article the authors longitudinally examined associations between family involvement, children's feelings about literacy, and children's literacy achievement from kindergarten through fifth grade. Children's feelings about literacy mediated associations between family educational involvement and literacy achievement. Also, family involvement was more positively associated with literacy outcomes for children whose mothers were less educated compared with children whose mothers were more educated.