“Thank you for bringing this program to our classrooms, the kids are so enthusiastic about the red bags (which allow them to take ownership over books when many of them have none at home).” Teacher, Community Day Care, Lawrence
Raising A Reader MA maintains a multi-tiered approach to monitoring and assessing our impact. The success of Raising A Reader MA’s work lies in our ability to ensure our partners are implementing the core program model with fidelity. We then link fidelity of implementation to family behaviors and impact on the child.
Our program evaluation is designed to answer the following questions:
- Did our partners implement the core program model with at least 90% fidelity?
- If so, did participation in Raising A Reader MA’s program have the intended impact on families’ home book sharing behaviors?
If we achieve both of these outcomes we can use national evaluation data to link our program with improved child outcomes.
Fidelity of Implementation: In order to ensure that our program is implemented with fidelity, we carefully monitor community activities a specially designed database to track the following outcomes:
- The percentage of staff at participating Raising A Reader MA implementation sites who participate in Raising A Reader MA training
- The percentage of implementation sites facilitating the red bag book rotation program and related instructional activities with integrity
- The percentage of families who receive multilingual orientation materials about Dialogic Reading and the red bag book rotation program
- The percentage of communities offering Dialogic Reading workshops that are accessible to eligible families
- Average parent participation in Dialogic Reading workshops and training
Our program staff staff to collect and analyze data including participant demographics, training comprehension, program implementation by site, and constituent satisfaction at least twice a year to ensure programs are on track to achieve implementation and outcome goals
Parent Behavior Change: Decades of research has shown that when parents read regularly with their children, the children’s pre-literacy skills improve. In order to track this important behavior change, Raising A Reader MA employs parent pre- and post- surveys as well as focus groups and interviews to access both the quantity and quality of their shared reading behaviors.
Annual program evaluation data shows that families’ rate of home book sharing increases by as many as 20 percentage points over the course of a year, up to 75% reporting reading together at home three or more times a week. Baseline data collected at the start of the program shows that before the program, fewer than 45% of families report reading together at home regularly.
Child Outcomes: The final piece of Raising A Reader MA’s assessment system is measuring child pre-literacy skills. Our first quasi-experimental study using measures of vocabulary and letter awareness was designed and led in 2010 by Dr. Nonie Lesaux of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. We are currently partnering with school districts and the MA Department of Early Care and Education to share more of this critical data.