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.
Blogging (BLOG’ing)
Julia Coffman of Harvard Family Research Project wants to save you from the embarrassment of making the same mistake she made.
Simplifying Complex Initiative Evaluation
Julia Coffman of Harvard Family Research Project writes about using a logic model approach to evaluate a large and diverse foundation initiative.
Electronic Mailbox
A list of useful resources on the Internet.
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.
Making Families Matter at Two-Year Colleges: Training the Early Childhood Workforce to Support Families
$10.00 . 75 Pages.
A Conversation With Richard Rothstein
Richard Rothstein argues that narrowing the achievement gap requires substantial changes in social policy in addition to extensive school reform.
Beyond the Usual Suspects
Julia Coffman, from Harvard Family Research Project, describes methods for campaign evaluation that are unique to the communications arena.
Evaluating Seattle's Family Centers
Julia Coffman at Harvard Family Research Project describes the Seattle's Five-Tiered Approach to evaluating its family centers.
Evaluating Partnerships: Seven Success Factors
Dr. Hector Garza of the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships describes what he looks for when evaluating educational partnerships.
A Conversation with Michael Quinn Patton
Director of an organizational development consulting practice, professor, and author, Michael Quinn Patton reveals historical and emerging trends in evaluation practice.
Sustainability: Does Evaluation Have a Role?
Julia Coffman and Marielle Bohan-Baker of HFRP offer ideas for how evaluation can ensure that initiative stakeholders discuss sustainability before it is too late to be useful.
Lessons in Evaluating Communications Campaigns: Five Case Studies
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.
Public Communication Campaign Evaluation: An Environmental Scan of Challenges, Criticisms, Practice, and Opportunities
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.
Learning by Listening: A Longitudinal Study of Family Literacy
This study explores the reading concepts held by urban families and how home reading practices intersect with school literacy practices.
Free. Available online only.
Beyond Basic Training
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.
Bridging Multiple Worlds: Building Pathways From Childhood to College
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.
Participatory Evaluation: Enhancing Evaluation Use and Organizational Learning Capacity
Ten Strategies for Enhancing Multicultural Competency in Evaluation
Teresa Boyd Cowles of the Connecticut Department of Education offers self-reflective strategies evaluators can use to enhance their multicultural competency.
“For the first time I understand what it takes for my own child to graduate”: Engaging Immigrant Families around Data
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.
British Bangladeshi and Pakistani Families and Education Involvement: Barriers and Possibilities
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.
Balancing Priorities in the Evaluation of Educational Technology
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.
Avoiding Unwarranted Death by Evaluation
Lois-ellin Datta of Datta Analysis points to the importance of studying control and comparison group experiences when conducting experimental studies.
Credentialing Caregivers
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.
More Than a Gut Feeling: The Real Value of Family and Community Engagement
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.
The Promotive Effects of Family Educational Involvement for Low-Income Children
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.