By Mary Alma Connell
York County Literacy Council, PA

Family literacy programs within volunteer programs, Even Start, and other sectors are facing several evaluation issues:

• lack of clarity of goals of family literacy programs (at program, site, and public policy levels);
• lack of clarity and completeness of definition of "family impact" goals;
• lack of measurement systems for assessing family impact;
• lack of resources to assess family impact (beyond using questionnaires or interviews and observations at sites away from home, often at school)
• lack of consistency of adoption of an intended program model across sites or within sites from year to year;
• mobility of the participating families combined with open enrollment and separation of families (families begin and leave programs at different times, sometimes leaving a program without notice, resulting in no post-test/post-service data collected);
• varying levels within small groups served by individual projects, requiring evaluation models based on case studies or some other techniques appropriate for individuals or small groups;
• lack of clear mapping of the target audience for family literacy services, resulting in minimal understanding of the characteristics of the population in respect to factors relating to reasonableness of goals, appropriateness of programs, or times and processes required for changes in the families to occur;
• inability to select control or comparison groups for use when interpreting changes that are assessed; and
• lack of measurements for assessing characteristics of young children, or lack of general agreement of early education about the appropriateness of the assessment tools available.

• each component of the program should be as strong as the total program;
• set well defined long-term and short-term goals for your family literacy program;
• because family literacy programs are complex programs designed to serve the needs of both adults and children, be sure to distinguish between skills and ages of both the adults and the children;
• set reasonable expectations given the nature of families you will serve and the amount of engagement;
• to assess family impact, have objective interviewers from outside the program and/or go into homes to observe and interview families;
• because the program population is mobile, set intermediate goals and collect data at the end of shorter intervals;
• do case studies and combine them if they are homogeneous;
• investigate the parent/child interaction through questionnaires;
• look for assessment scales for self-esteem and parenting efficacy which are available in the public domain.

Mary Alma Connell, former coordinator of the Family Reading Program at York County Literacy Council, York, PA, an LVA affiliate and GTE Family Learning Center, attended the 1998 National Conference on Family Literacy. The information above was gathered at two sessions she attended devoted to the evaluation of family literacy programs: Evaluation and Measurement Issues was presented by Andrew E. Hayes, University of North Carolina-Wilmington and National Center for Family Literacy; Measuring Those "Hard to Capture" Aspects of Family Literacy was presented by Jeff Tucker, National Center for Family Literacy.

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