A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

National Evaluation of The Even Start Family Literacy Program, 1998

Chapter 5

How Many Instructional Hours Are Offered by Even Start?

A critical element of any educational program is the service intensity.⁵⁸ Intensity refers to at least two aspects of instructional curricula—amount and quality of services. While it is difficult to capture the qualitative aspects of Even Start educational activities across nearly 650 projects, the amount of instructional hours that projects offer has been tracked since the first year of the national evaluation. Admittedly, the number of hours alone reveals little about the quality of what is taught, how it is taught, and how well it is taught. However, analyses from the previous years have shown positive relationships between "hours offered" and key participation measures.⁵⁹

For each instructional area, projects reported the scheduled instructional time offered to a typical participant according to the following breakdown:

• Times per month;

• Hours per month;

• Duration of instruction in months; and

• Hours per month of home-based instruction.⁶⁰

Increases Since 1992-93

Exhibit 5.4 displays the average hours per year of adult education and parenting education services offered since 1993-94. For all levels of adult education, the contact hours offered increased substantially.⁶¹ The average increases from 1993-94 to 1996-97 ranged from thirty-five to ninety-two hours per year, depending on educational levels.⁶²

On average, Even Start parenting education involves substantially fewer hours than either adult or early childhood education. The average number of parenting education hours that projects provide increased by twenty-five hours between 1993-94 and 1994-95; however, this intensity level—around 200 hours—has remained relatively stable for the past three years. This stability contrasts with the steady yearly increases in service intensity in all other service areas.

Instructional hours for early childhood education have increased substantially since 1993-94 (Exhibit 5.5). The hours of educational activities for infants and toddlers under age 3 rose from an annual average of 280 hours in 1993-94 to 406 hours in 1996-97. This amounts to an increase of ten to eleven hours per month. The number of project sites offering services to infants and toddlers also increased from 71 percent in 1994-95 to 84 percent in 1996-97 (not shown in the exhibit). Thus, projects are accommodating the increased enrollment of infants and toddlers by expanding services for this age group?both in terms of availability as well as intensity. This also suggests that more children are benefiting from the Even Start services (e.g., early childhood education, parenting education services for their parents, early intervention services) from an earlier age than was common in previous years.

Contact hours for educational services for children ages 6 and 7 more than doubled between 1993-94 and 1994-95. At least some of this increase may be due to factors other than programmatic changes. For instance, the leap from 225 hours to 557 hours may be related to the 1995 legislative change that allowed projects to report Title I program services as part of their local cost share. This accounting change may have encouraged projects to report more fully the school activities that can be counted as part of Even Start services (i.e., if they are coordinated with the overall Even Start services). Again, it should be noted that these are the contact hours projects offered to participants, not the actual hours of participation.

Overall, the increases in the hours of early childhood education were particularly steep between 1993-94 and 1994-95, ranging from seventy to 332 hours per year of increases, and continuing into 1995-96. In 1995-96, the large number of projects that entered in 1993-94 (the beginning of the second four-year program cycle) reached their third year of operation. That year, nearly 40 percent of all projects were three to four years old and another 30 percent had five or more years of experience. (As we will discuss shortly, project age influenced the number of service hours offered.)

The rate of increase in the hours of early childhood education slowed between 1995-96 and 1996-97. In fact, for 5-year-olds and school-aged children, the average hours offered declined by twenty-one to twenty-two hours. Estimating on the basis of a ten-month school program, the services offered to children in 1996-97 amounted to roughly four hours a day, three days a week for children aged 3 to 5 years. Similar to the pattern seen with parenting education, the Even Start early childhood education program as a whole may stabilize at this level. Of course, there are enormous variations in the amount of services offered across projects. As we discuss in Chapters 6 and 8, projects that offer more intensive educational services tend to reap higher participation rates (see Chapter 6) and possibly greater educational gains (see Chapter 8).

Home-based Versus Center-based Services

Most Even Start projects provide "center-based services"?instructional activities conducted in classrooms and other types of centralized facilities. However, some projects offer primarily "home-based services," which involve Even Start staff conducting highly individualized instructional activities in participants' homes.⁶³ Home-based services may be particularly suitable for projects located in remote rural areas where the participating families are geographically dispersed and access to transportation is constrained by availability and/or cost. However, even in more urban areas, projects may choose this mode of service to ensure that participants receive highly individualized services that are closely tailored to each family's needs and home circumstances.

The extent of home-based instructional activities was stable between 1992-93 and 1996-97 for adult and parenting education. The prevalence of home-based early childhood education increased during the five-year period. This trend may reflect the rising enrollment of infants and toddlers and the relative scarcity of existing center-based educational programs available for this age group.

Within a given project, the prevalence of home-based activities varied by the educational service area. For instance, a project's adult education program may focus on GED preparation classes conducted in a high school or community college, while parenting education and a large portion of early childhood education may be conducted in participants' homes. Regardless of service area, few projects provided a large portion of instruction in participants' homes.

In 1996-97, 14 percent of projects offered 40 percent or more of adult education hours in the home setting. Thirty percent of projects offered this level of home-based parenting education; 27 percent of projects offered this level of early childhood education in the home. For analysis purposes, we averaged the percentages of home-based adult, parenting, and early childhood education hours and labeled projects that reported 40 percent or more of their total educational services in home settings as home-based.⁶⁴ Only 17 percent of projects met this description. Home-based projects, thus defined, were somewhat more prevalent in rural areas (23 percent). However, some of these projects were found in urban and "mixed" communities (13 percent and 8 percent, respectively).

Variations in the Amount of Services Offered to Families

The wide variation in the educational service hours that individual projects offer begs the question: what project and participant characteristics influence program intensity? Based on previous years' data, we expected that projects with several years of experience in operating Even Start would tend to offer more instructional hours than less mature projects. We also anticipated that center-based projects would offer more instructional hours than home-based projects.

Using multiple regression to examine the 1996-97 data, we examined the relationship between hours of adult education services offered per month and the following project characteristics, each of which could potentially affect the amount of services projects offer:⁶⁵

• Urban versus rural service area;

• Project age (years of experience in operating Even Start);

• Number of families served in 1996-97;

• Ratio of instructional hours offered that are home-based;

• Total project funds for 1996-97;

• Number of Even Start paid staff;

• Ratio of instructors with college degrees or higher education;

• Ratio of instructors with five or more years of relevant experience;

• Ratio of families in which the participating parent has limited English proficiency;

• Ratio of families headed by teen parents; and

• Ratio of very needy families?those who have four or more of the seven need indices (described in Chapter 3).

Not surprisingly, projects with larger budgets offered more hours of adult education. Also as expected, center-based projects typically provided more hours of adult education than did home-based projects. Further analysis (using the analysis of variance method) indicated that "home-based projects" (as defined by the method described in the footnote above) offered an average of eighteen hours of adult education per month compared to an average of thirty-four hours among mainly center-based projects (Exhibit 5.6).

In terms of participant characteristics, projects with higher percentages of teen parents offered more adult education hours. This is not surprising because high school instructional hours can be reported as Even Start adult education hours for this evaluation. Exhibit 5.6 shows that projects in which less than 3 percent of parents were teens offered an average of twenty-five hours of adult education per month, compared with nearly thirty-five hours offered in projects where more than 20 percent of parents were under age 20. Finally, projects serving higher percentages of very needy families (with four or more of the seven needs discussed in Chapter 3) offered more hours of adult education. For every 10 percent increase in the proportion of very needy families served (holding constant the influence of other factors) the adult education hours offered per month increased an average of 12.26 hours (Appendix C, Exhibit C.3).

Projects were more uniform in the parenting education hours they offered. (This uniformity may be due, in part, to the relatively small range of parenting hours offered compared to adult education hours.) Neither project age, project budget, nor any of the staff characteristics were significantly related to this aspect of service intensity (Appendix C, Exhibit C.4).

However, two factors were clearly related to variations in parenting education: home- versus center-based project design and the prevalence of very needy families. Projects that provided 40 percent or more of instructional services in the home setting offered an average of twelve hours of parenting education per month, compared to twenty-one hours among projects that were more center-based (Exhibit 5.7). Projects in which more than 55 percent of families were very needy offered twenty-four hours of parenting education services per month, compared to eighteen hours offered by projects with fewer than 29 percent of very needy families.

In the early childhood education area, we again found fewer hours offered by home-based projects than center-based projects—averages of twenty-three versus forty-eight hours (Exhibit 5.8). As we found with adult education hours offered, projects with larger budgets offered almost ten more hours per month of educational services to children.

Also of interest are the factors that were not strongly related to service intensity. Rural/urban community differences, project size, and staff qualifications bore no substantive relationship to educational hours offered in any of the three core service areas (when the effects of the other project and participant characteristics were excluded). Project age was related somewhat to adult education hours but not to parenting or early childhood education hours offered. Project budget influenced the hours offered for adult and early childhood education but not for parenting education.

Home-based programs offered consistently and substantially fewer instructional hours across service areas relative to center-based programs, suggesting that projects balance offering a greater number of contact hours to a group of participants at central facilities versus individually-tailored instructions during fewer hours of home visits. Projects serving high percentages of very needy families offered more adult and parenting education hours than did projects serving fewer very needy families. These findings indicate that parents with greater needs (based on our working definition of very needy families) may require more extensive services to achieve their goals than less needy parents and that projects are responding to this need.

⁶⁵ Detailed explanations of the dependent and independent measures entered in the regression analyses and the analysis results are provided in Appendix C. All results discussed in this report were statistically significant, unless otherwise noted.

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