11. Increase Parent Involvement

In this type of project, because it is a major undertaking, you have chosen to limit yourself to implementing the new parent-involvement program and to determining whether there was in increase in parent involvement, but to leave the determination of the impact of parent involvement on student behavior and learning to a later time.

There is nothing wrong with this. Often the task of implementing a new program is such a major effort that it would not be possible during the time of your dissertation period for you to also carry out an evaluation of the program's impact on student behavior and learning.

However, though establishing a new program to increase parent involvement and determining if that occurred is an entirely respectable task in its own right, you will not be able to reach any conclusions or make any statements about the new parent involvement program's impact on such things as student attitudes toward school, attendance, drop-out rates, grades, achievement scores, and the like. That will have to await the completion of an expanded outcome evaluation.

Your evaluation will be a combination formative and summative type. Your first task is to determine if the major elements of the new parent involvement program are in place and operational. Thus, you will need to assemble credible, objective evidence (not simply your own judgments) on the following types of questions:

1. Have adequate resources been allocated to the new program?
2. Have sufficient and competent staff been assigned to the new program?
3. Have the necessary materials been purchased and made available to those directly responsible for the new program?
4. Have lists and phone numbers of parents been assembled?
5. Have contacts been made and meetings scheduled?

This part of the evaluation will tell you whether the new parent involvement program is operational and potentially capable of having an impact-information that is administratively invaluable. It is essential to make this determination before you proceed to the question of whether there has been an increase in parent involvement. It makes no sense to evaluate the effectiveness of a program that does not exist-even though we regrettably see many instances of this.

The next step is to determine (1) if there has been significant increase in parent involvement and (2) if any increase that occurred can confidently be attributed to your new parent involvement program.

There are two preferred evaluation designs for answering these questions:

(1)   Collect pre- and post-program data on parent involvement in a school where the new parent-involvement program has been implemented and in a comparable control school where it hasn't. If the increase in parent involvement in the school where the new program was implemented are statistically greater than those in the control school, you can confidently conclude that the increase was the result of the new program. Simply collecting pre- and post- program data on the treatment or program school without a control group will not do. Parent involvement may have increased because of other conditions or factors besides the new program. For comparison, you need some measure of change under the conditions of non-treatment. (See the section on An Example of the Most Common Pitfall in Evaluating Education Programs in the Short Course on Evaluation Basics.)

(2) As an alternative, if a control school is not available, you can use what is known as the interrupted time-series design. If parent involvement data are available for several years or periods prior to the introduction of the new program, and there is a marked improvement in parent involvement immediately following the introduction of the new program that is sustained in following years or periods, you can confidently conclude that the gains were the result of the new program.

For more information on these two designs, see the section on Alternative Summative Evaluation Methods in the Short Course on Evaluation Basics, and references 1 (Campbell), 4 (Cook & Campbell), and 8 (Rossi & Freeman) in the Evaluation References.

If you find that your new program did in fact result in an increase in parent involvement, and you want to also assess its impact on such things as student attitudes toward school, attendance, drop-out rates, grades, achievement scores, student achievement, and the like, you must carry out an expanded summative evaluation on these outcome measures using either of the two designs described above. See evaluation designs 2, 3, 6, and 8.

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