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.
Erik Greer
Erik's first grade teacher is concerned about his intentional aggression towards other children and communicates regularly with Erik's mother about it. Subtle differences in beliefs between Erik's mother and teacher leave both feeling unsatisfied in their attempts to help Erik. How can the two build a partnership to change Erik's behavior?
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Evaluating a Literacy Program Using Web Surveys
Daniel Khimasia from Frontier College shares lessons learned from evaluating the administering of a literacy program using web surveys.
Evaluating a Professional Development “Cascade”: From Facilitators to University Faculty to Early Childhood Providers
Caroline Wilkinson and Shelley Billig from RMC Research Corporation describe their evaluation of the New England Professional Development Initiative's cascade approach to professional development in early childhood education.
Evaluating Advocates' Spheres of Influence With Domain Leaders
The evaluation of the Center for Tobacco-Free Kids gathered data from a wide range of audiences that the advocacy organization targets in order to influence public policy.
Evaluating an Issue's Position on the Policy Agenda: The Bellwether Methodology
Policy issues need both visibility and momentum to be transformed into political action. Harvard Family Research Project's bellwether methodology helps evaluators assess if both characteristics are emerging.
Evaluating BEST Fit: A Program to Promote Child and Family Health After School
Jim Sass and Craig Blumenthal from LA's BEST describe how the BEST Fit initiative links with multiple organizations to support child and family health.
Evaluating CBIs: Facing the Challenges and Improving Practice
Karen Horsch from Harvard Family Research Project reveals the practices that nine evaluators of community-based initiatives have used and lessons they have learned addressing challenges.
Evaluating Citizen Schools
Charlie Schlegel of Citizen Schools explains how their evaluation strategy successfully balances the need to determine program impact with the need for continuous improvement.
Evaluating Collaboratives: Challenges and Practice
Ellen Taylor-Powell from the University of Wisconsin-Cooperative Extension examines the challenges of collaboratives, and how they stretch us to think about evaluation in new ways.
Evaluating Communications Strategies: Learning From the Communications for Child Protection Project
Richard Brandon and Andrew Gordon from the University of Washington describe how they are evaluating the effectiveness of communications strategies aimed at strengthening the linkage between public opinion and public policy.
Evaluating Community-Based Initiatives
M. Elena Lopez and Cami Anderson of Harvard Family Research Project conduct a focus group of Executive Directors of five complex CBIs to learn about the evaluation and self-assessment efforts.
Evaluating Community-Based Initiatives
Many lessons have been learned during the past decade of community building; this issue of The Evaluation Exchange explores many of these lessons and their implications. Articles by experienced and insightful authors discuss a number of critical issues now surfacing in this field, including innovations in community-building evaluation, the role of cultural competency in community-based research and evaluation, and how evaluators and funders can better build on the evaluation and learning approaches that community-based organizations already use to improve their work.
Free. 20 Pages.
Evaluating Complicated—and Complex—Programs Using Theory of Change
Patricia Rogers of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology describes how a theory of change can provide coherence in evaluating national initiatives that are both complicated and complex.
Evaluating Early Childhood Services: What's Really Behind the Curtain
Jack Shonkoff, dean of the Heller School at Brandeis University, describes the highly politicized environment of program evaluation and its attendant challenges.
Evaluating Education Reform
Education reform is complex and so are its evaluations. This issue of The Evaluation Exchange explores key dimensions of reform, including standards-based reform, technology in education, Comer schools, and new forms of public accountability. It addresses the links among education policy, practice, and evaluation and how research and evaluation can inform policy and practice.
Free. 24 Pages.
Evaluating Education Reform: Early Childhood Education
Over the past three decades, an enormous body of research literature has been amassed on early childhood education, parent education, and family support programs. This review summarizes these three areas of research and reports on relevant research in progress.
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Evaluating Effect Sizes in the Policy Arena
Kathleen McCartney and Eric Dearing from the Harvard Graduate School of Education provide an overview on effect size and what it reveals about the effectiveness of family support programs.
Evaluating Evaluation Data
Kathleen McCartney and Heather Weiss of the Harvard Graduate School of Education describe the conditions for evaluations to maintain scientific integrity and serve the public good despite a politicized environment.
Evaluating Family Involvement Programs
This issue of The Evaluation Exchange brings together the current knowledge base of programs in family support and family involvement, providing a continuous perspective on family processes with regard to children's learning and development, from a child's early years through adolescence. Articles address the challenges of evaluating family programs, such as the need for conceptual clarity, methodological rigor, accountability, and contextual responsiveness. Rounding out the issue are examples of ongoing evaluations of parent leadership and organizing to ensure that schools serve all children at high standards.
Evaluating Family Support: Thinking Critically, Thinking Internationally (Keynote Address)
Evaluation plays a major role in shaping new directions for the field of family support. In her keynote address at the Participatory Evaluation and Parent Engagement Institute, sponsored by Family Support America and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, in Kansas City, Missouri, September 20–22, 2004, Heather Weiss, Founder and Director of HFRP, described how evaluation can support learning, continuous improvement, and innovation. The four components of a family support evaluation strategy that she outlined were experimental studies to show program impact on families, utilization-focused evaluation to support policy and practitioner decision making, action research and empowerment evaluation, and performance standards based on solid research and evaluation.
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Evaluating Municipal Out-of-School Time Initiatives
To inform municipal leaders who are developing out-of-school time evaluations, HFRP scanned the city-level initiatives in its evaluation profiles database and prepared this short brief that describes the evaluation approaches, methods, and performance measures that some cities are using for evaluation.
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Evaluating New Jersey’s School-Based Youth Services Program
Anita Baker and Constancia Warren of the Academy for Educational Development describe their evaluation of New Jersey's School-Based Youth Services Program.
Evaluating Nonprofit Advocacy Simply: An Oxymoron?
Marcia Egbert and Susan Hoechstetter offer nine principles to guide advocacy evaluation, based on a recent and groundbreaking Alliance for Justice tool on this topic.
Evaluating Old Grove's Family Support Center
Harvard Family Research Project presents synopses of three alternative approaches to evaluating a hypothetical Robinswood Family Resource Center.
Evaluating Out-of-School Time
This is the third issue of The Evaluation Exchange (Harvard Family Research Project's quarterly evaluation periodical) devoted to exploring the challenges and solutions associated with evaluating out-of-school (OST) programs. This issue includes articles on what we know from existing research and evaluation about the results that are possible from OST programming, expert commentary on what the future OST research and evaluation agenda should look like, and information about hands-on research and evaluation tools and resources. It is also includes a special report with expert commentary on the implications of the first year findings in Mathematica's evaluation of the national 21st Century Community Learning Centers program. To read the previous issues on out-of-school time, go to our issue archive.
Free. 24 Pages.