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

What Aspects of Even Start Services Are Related to Participation Rates?

A number of participant and project characteristics were found to be associated with various measures of participation rates. As we mentioned earlier, many of the findings, while statistically significant, were inconsistent across related analyses and should be regarded as preliminary indications until similar findings emerge in future analyses.

However, three factors repeatedly emerged as contributors to families' participation: service intensity (hours offered in each of the three core educational components), support services that families received, and integration of services. The data suggest the following: (1) Projects should increase and maintain high levels of contact hours offered. Even though most Even Start families participate in fewer hours of instruction than the amount offered, they participate more in projects that offer more hours. (2) Projects should integrate, as much as possible, the instructional context, contents, and/or activities across adult, parenting, and early childhood education. (3) Projects should provide as many support services as possible, either directly or through referrals to collaborating agencies, to enable families to participate fully in Even Start educational services.

Service Intensity (Hours Offered)

Since 1994-95, we have found a strong relationship between the number of contact hours that projects scheduled per participant and the hours that parents and children actually participated. Overall, participation increased according to the number of service hours offered for both adult and parenting education (Exhibit 6.10).⁸⁵

For early childhood education, the relationship between service intensity and participation varied by enrollment status (see Exhibit 6.8). Among new enrollees, the highest percentages of the ten to twelve month participants (17 and 16 percent) were enrolled in projects that offered thirty-six or more hours per month.

Among continuing students, however, the highest percentages of full-year participants (39 percent and 38 percent) were found in projects that offered the fewest contact hours (fifteen or less) as well as the most hours (sixty-five or more).⁸⁶ These results may suggest that offering more hours of services and offering qualitatively intensive services may represent two separate factors; each is important and combined they would be the most effective.

Support Services Families Received

Projects may not always be able to remove personal and family circumstances that act as barriers to participation, but, as we saw in Chapter 4, they can offer support services that make Even Start educational services more accessible to families. The number of support services received by families was a consistent, substantial, and positive indicator of high levels of participation in adult, parenting, and early childhood education programs. As a group, families who received five to nine support services in 1996-97 also were more likely to participate in all three core educational components.

Integration of Services

Integration of the three core educational services was associated with greater participation in adult and parenting education.⁸⁷ Children enrolled in projects with highly integrated educational programs were significantly more likely than those in less integrated programs to have received ten to twelve months of early childhood education. The higher participation rates among families enrolled in relatively more integrated programs suggest that families may find these activities meet their multiple educational needs more effectively than more compartmentalized activities.

Thus, families enrolled in projects that offered more hours of instructional services and more integrated services relative to others and families that received more support services participated more in Even Start educational services. This does not mean that other aspects of services (types of curriculum, staff qualifications, resources spent per family, etc.) are not important. With more refined measures, future analyses may be able to assess more clearly the relative importance of many other service characteristics.

Footnotes:

⁸⁵ Note: whether a family was a new enrollee or continuing from previous years was not strongly related to adult and parenting education participation hours (based on regression analyses, see Appendix C).

⁸⁶ Projects offering relatively few hours of early childhood education were not necessarily the projects that offered largely home-based services.

⁸⁷ This was NOT due to double counting hours of participation in activities that integrated adult and parenting education objectives and/or content topics. Unlike the hours of services offered, projects were asked NOT to double-count the participation hours; each hour was reported either as adult education or parenting education, depending on the primary purpose of the activity.

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[ What Percentage of Families Participated in All Three Core Components? ]

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