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 6: To What Extent Did Even Start Families Participate in the Services Offered?

Even Start families face many disadvantages beyond low literacy and poverty. These include: unemployment and under-employment; limited English proficiency; physical handicaps, chronic mental or physical problems; and homelessness. Even Start projects implement various strategies to address the diverse educational needs of families. They also provide support services to enable the families to derive the maximum benefit from the educational opportunities. Even so, retaining families, maintaining participant motivation, and helping parents to achieve their educational goals often are the most challenging tasks that projects perform.

This chapter focuses on the extent of participation by all (both new and continuing) families who received Even Start services in 1996-97. For selected analyses, the results are compared to participation rates from the previous years of this evaluation. Family-level participation patterns were assessed using the following measures:

• The number of home visits families received during the year;

• Types and hours of adult education and parenting education services in which parents participated;

• The number of months in which children participated in early childhood education;

• The frequency of children's absences from early childhood education activities;

• Whether the family participated in all or only some of the three core services;

• Whether the family was retained at the year's end; and

• The reported reasons for families' exiting the program during the program year.

We examined these participation measures in relation to a number of participant and project characteristics that were discussed in Chapters 3 through 5 and that might potentially be related to the extent of families' participation (Exhibit 6.1).

First, we used multiple regression techniques to assess whether a family or a project characteristic was related to the outcome of interest (i.e., the dependent variable such as the number of home visits) while controlling for the potential influence of all other participant and project characteristics entered into the same analysis. Then we used the results of the regression analyses to guide further examination of the relationships between participant and project characteristics and each participation measure using the analysis of variance method.⁷²

Footnotes:

⁷² See Appendix C for further discussion of the multivariate analysis approach, the variables used in these analyses, the rationale for the analysis approach, and the summary table of final statistics for regression analyses.

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[ How Do Projects Accommodate Participants' Needs? ]

[ How Many Home Visits Were Made to Families? ]