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.
Risk
John Bare of the Knight Foundation shares his foundation's definition of the term “risk” when it comes to investing in initiatives, borrowing from the language of money managers.
Risk and Resilience in Children and Families: Implications for Public Policy
With the implementation of welfare reform, government's increasing reliance on block grants rather than categorical funding, increasing devolution of responsibility for service delivery to the state and local level, increasing use of contracted services, and growing budget shortfalls at all levels of government, the social safety net in the United States is undergoing rapid transformation. How well the emerging “system” will protect children and support families is unknown. This course is designed to examine current and proposed child and family policies.
Free. Available online only.
Save the Children’s Literacy Programs in Rural America: Evaluation That Informs Scale-Up
Elizabeth Reisner of Policy Studies Associates discusses how the learning gains of STC’s children’s literacy program relate to the program’s scaling process: evidence of participant learning influenced the growth and further development of the program positively and powerfully.
Scaling Impact: Six Takeaways
HFRP summarizes key observations in this issue of The Evaluation Exchange. Scaling impact often refers to scaling programs or interventions, but ideas, technologies, skills, and policies can also be scaled. Thinking about scale more broadly can reveal possibilities for scaling impact beyond the traditional business model of replication.
Scaling Social Entrepreneurial Impact: The SCALERS Model
Paul Bloom and Aaron Chatterji of Duke University discuss their model for conceptualizing scaling impact for social entrepreneurs—individuals who start up and lead new organizations or programs to address social problems using change strategies that differ from those used in the past.
School Community Leadership
This course will address the identification and utilization of community resources and the creation of family engagement partnerships, community linkages, and collaborative efforts to provide for the educational, cultural, health, lifelong learning, vocational, and out-of-school needs of students and citizens in a community.
Free. Available online only.
School Won't Let Mom Talk About Her Casino Job
A middle school principal will not allow a single mother employed by the local casino to address her daughter's class during Career Week because he is concerned about promoting gambling. How can this school reorganize to serve and respect all families?
Free. Available online only.
School-Based Services: Traditional and Emerging Models to Address Barriers to Learning
This course will survey various models of community-based services that support students in schools. It will also cover implementation and evaluation of services.
Free. Available online only.
School-Family Relationship: Some Lessons From a Teacher Professional Development Program
Three studies explore how university–school research partnerships can provide teacher professional development to strengthen parent–teacher relations.
Free. Available online only.
School-Linked Services
This issue of The Evaluation Exchange investigates evaluating the school-linked services that attempt to address and find preventive solutions for the array of problems facing children and families.
Schools in Communities
In this course, we deepen the preparation of teachers in training, focusing on schools as organizations in specific political communities wherein people exercise more or less democratic voices in public policies that govern their economic, housing, and education opportunities. Teachers make and influence policies in their classrooms, at their campuses, and in the institutions and/or districts in which they work.
Free. Available online only.
Schools, Families, and Community
Students who are currently working or preparing to work in the fields of education and human services will be engaged through interactive learning experiences to understand the development of partnerships with schools to reach, engage, and support families. The model for community success includes building partnerships and providing supports and opportunities that promote active and positive working relationships. The discussions, assignments, and in-class activities will provide students with a vision and practical knowledge of what effective partnerships look like and how to strategize ways of tapping into community resources.
Free. Available online only.
Seamless and Connected—Education in the Digital Age
Through connected learning, says Mizuko Ito, schools, museums, and libraries are employing innovative strategies, leveraging digital media to make learning more relevant and engaging to youth, and linking the crucial spheres in a learner’s life—peers, interests, and academic pursuits.
Seattle School District's Community Alignment Initiative
Sara Tenney-Espinosa, of the Seattle School District, describes the evaluation goals and early findings from a collaboration between the district and local after school providers.
Seeing is Believing: Promising Practices for How School Districts Promote Family Engagement
We teamed up with the National PTA to bring you this ground-breaking policy brief that examines the role of school districts in promoting family engagement. The brief spotlights how six school districts have used innovative strategies to create and sustain family engagement “systems at work.”
Free. Available online only.
Selected Evaluation Terms
This resource provides definitions of evaluation terminology frequently used in the out-of-school time field. It also provides answers to frequently asked evaluation questions.
Free. Available online only.
Selection Into Out-of-School Time Activities: The Role of Family Contexts Within and Across Neighborhood
This poster examined disadvantage at the family and neighborhood level and their associations with participation in out-of-school time activities. Specifically, the authors demonstrate that neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) characteristics (i.e., income, education, and employment) mediate the association between family income, parent education, and ethnicity and children's participation in a variety of activities outside of school. Family income and parent education, for example, are positively associated with an increased probability of youth participating in before- and after-school programs, community programs, and community center activities, but this increased probability is explained entirely by the fact that children in higher income and more educated families live in higher SES neighborhoods. Poster session submitted to Society for Research on Adolescence 2006 Bienniel Meeting, San Francisco, CA.
Self, Family, Community, and Schooling
This course, with its fieldwork component, takes gradual and small steps in grappling with the constituent parts of culture. Taking the notion of self as a center of relationship, we adopt a bottom-up approach in tracing how culture dialectically implicates individual mind and selfhood. Forming several research teams, each group will undertake an empirical studies in designated field sites. Each team, using methodological tools available in visual anthropology and video ethnography (with support from the teaching and technical staff), will be required to relate their research findings to one or more theoretical themes covered in this course.
Free. Available online only.
Self-Governing Communities and Families: Real-Time Change and Performance
Gary Nelson, Director of Family Forum, outlines the Real-Time Change and Performance Model, which provides a philosophy, process, and a set of tools for improving results for communities and families.
Service is Everything: How Home Visiting Service Delivery Impacts Family Outcomes
Anne Duggan is Professor of Pediatrics and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Duggan reflects on what she has learned from nearly 20 years of evaluative research on home visiting—particularly looking at what factors influence service delivery and family outcomes—and how that research can be applied to practice.
Setting Standards at Porter Road School
A fourth grade teacher weighs the advantages and disadvantages of a mandated state educational test on her students. She must weigh the conflicting perspectives of parents, students, community members, and her teaching colleagues to define her own stance in regard to the test and to present her thoughts to the school principal.
Free. Available online only.
Seven Takeaways About the Future of Family Involvement
HFRP summarizes key observations raised in this issue of The Evaluation Exchange. Based on findings from research and evaluation, these themes highlight what the field needs to know and do to move family involvement forward in policy and practice.
Sharing Assessment Data With Preschool Families in Preparation for Kindergarten
What are the benefits and challenges of sharing assessment data with preschool families? How can you do so effectively? A preschool teacher writes about her experiences, and provides valuable tips on how to share data with families in preparation for kindergarten.
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.