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Session II.
Local Evaluations and How to Integrate the National Requirements into What is Done Locally.
Dr. Eloise Appel
Dr. Eloise Appel is an evaluation consultant specializing in evaluation of
family literacy programs and has conducted workshops for the California
Department of Education, the National Center for Family Literacy. Dr.
Appel serves on the advisory panel for the national evaluation study of
Even Start programs. She has worked in the field of family literacy since
1989 and is currently an evaluation consultant for nine local family
literacy projects in California. |
Dr. Appel highlighted the importance of the information available in the ESPIRS. There is too much time and energy put into the data for it not to be used by the local projects. She spoke of the differences between the local and national evaluation. Local evaluations are to be used to answer the local questions. Those are questions, which are important to the local program as worked out by the coordinator and the local evaluator. The national evaluation is designed to provide information to the nation on the progress of Even Start as a whole. The audience for this report is the Department of Education and the other program funders. It is a much more general progress report. It should be realized that this report is a database and should be used with this in mind as a project is examined.
Dr. Appel focused on a series of questions that could be used as a guide for local evaluation:
- What do we want to do?
- What are we doing?
- Who are we serving?
- How well are we doing?
- How can we improve?
- What are participation levels?
- What changes have occurred?
- Are changes sustained?
Each of these questions was presented in terms of the various stages of program development and project maturity. Specific questions were highlighted as specific links to the ESPIRS. Dr. Appel reviewed the ESPIRS and identified "Seven Umbrella Questions" and then spent the remaining time showing the participants where in the ESPIRS the answers could be found. The "Seven Umbrella Questions" were:
- What are the characteristics of the adults and children served by the program (gender, age, ethnicity, primary language, level of schooling, welfare status, employment status, and family income)?
- To what extent do families participate in services offered and to what extent do families participate?
- To what extend do program adults demonstrate increased reading, writing, and math skills / behaviors?
- To what extend do parents provide a literacy-rich environment to support the education of their children at home?
- To what extent do parents support their children's education by participating in school activity?
- To what extent do parents engage in behaviors that support the education of their children at home?
- To what extend do parents report increases in their children's pre-literacy, literacy and number skills?
In each instance Dr.Appel used the ESPIRS as the database to answer the
questions. This involved graphs, charts and narrative examples. She provides a number of practical and concrete methods to link the data to the local situation. In order to reinforce the use of the data she broke the participants into small groups and provided sections of the ESPIRS Form E sections A-B and C. This exercise provided the participants with a hands on experience in using the data base of ESPIRS to locate answers to the umbrella questions.
Dr. Appel reiterated her support for using the ESPIRS data because of its
importance to each local project as well as the fact that each project has spent so much time energy and money collecting an enormous amount of data.
Dr. Appel provided the following resources for the participants:
- An outline of her presentation,
- Seven Umbrella questions,
- Description of the evaluation stages
- Data graphs,
- Example of collection forms
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