A significant body of research documents the poorer outcomes of teen and non-marital parenthood for both children and parents, and recent statistics underscore the strong association between single parenthood and childhood poverty. Child Trends' latest Fact Sheet, What Works for Disadvantaged and Adolescent Parent Programs: Lessons from Experimental Evaluations of Social Programs and Interventions for Children, reviews 20 parenting programs that are geared toward enhancing the parent's development and/or educating disadvantaged and teenage mothers on effective parenting methods.
Child Trends' latest brief, Improving the Lives of Adolescents and Young Adults: Out-of-School Time Programs That Have Significant Positive Impacts, identifies 43 programs that have somewhat to very sizable, statistically significant impacts on adolescent or young adult outcomes. The brief uses Child Trends' online database of experimentally evaluated social interventions for children and youth, Lifecourse Interventions to Nurture Kids Successfully (LINKS), to identify programs with manuals that have positive impacts on a range of outcomes, such as behavior problems, physical health, and education.
The American Family Assets Study from the Search Institute highlights critical strengths in families that contribute to positive outcomes for both kids and parents, introduces a new framework of Family Assets which focus on healthy relationships and practices in families, and emphasizes strengths that are relevant to a wide diversity of families in America.
State assessments are increasingly used as outcome measures for education evaluations, and such evaluations generally use pretest scores as control variables. The correlation between the pretest and outcome (posttest) measures is a factor in determining, among other things, a study's statistical power. This report examines variability in pretest-posttest correlation coefficients for state assessment data on samples of low-performing, average-performing, and proficient students to determine how sample characteristics (such as achievement level) affect pretest-posttest correlation coefficients.
on assessing education programs - Thursday, November 10
November 08, 2011
As states move ahead in enhancing systems of care for young children, assessing and improving the quality of early care and education programs at all levels are becoming increasingly important.
Document to help plan parent education curricula. Includes indicators in 5 key areas: Parent development, parent-child relationships, child development, family development, culture and community. Used by educators in Early Childhood Family Education (ECFE) programs in Minnesota, but adaptable for any parent education program.
This brief summarizes a longer Social Policy Report. A quarter of the world's youngest children suffer one or more forms of severe deprivation and risk, such as poverty, disease, and exposure to violence. Early childhood development (ECD) programs are considered one of the most promising approaches to providing more equitable outcomes for deprived and at-risk children and families. While the number of children and families served by ECD programs has grown, research shows that without a concurrent commitment to program quality, potential gains for children may be lost and glaring disparities in outcomes maintained.
