Introduction to the Toolkit

Parents As Teachers National Center has developed a toolkit to assist staff in identifying instruments for use in the screening, assessment, and evaluation of young children and their parents. The toolkit contains 83 measures of child and parent outcomes. The overview of each measure includes a brief description of the instrument, the scope of the instrument, information on reliability and validity, required expertise and time required to administer the survey, languages in which it is available, and publisher information, including website information and cost (as of Spring/Summer 2005), where available. We also have included the measures' relationship to the goals of Parents as Teachers. In addition, we have commented on the advantages and disadvantages of the instrument as it pertains to evaluation. That is, there may be screening and assessment measures for young children that are extremely helpful for diagnostic purposes, but, because they have several different versions to account for maturational changes in the child, they may not be as useful as an evaluation tool.

Choosing the Appropriate Instrument

In order to select the appropriate evaluation measure, it is critical for anyone conducting an evaluation of a Parents As Teachers Born to Learn™ program to first closely review the Parents as Teachers Born to Learn logic model and understand the program's theory of change. If, for example, you are evaluating a family from the time they entered the program to one year after program entry, you would not anticipate long-term changes in the children at this time. Rather, you would anticipate that parent knowledge and skills would be affected, and the evaluation tools used should therefore measure parent change rather than changes in the child. If, on the other hand, you are evaluating progress from program entry to when a child enters Kindergarten (over, say, a five year period), you would expect to see changes in child cognitive, psychosocial, emotional, language, and motor skill development. In selecting the appropriate measure, be sure to consider whether or not you would truly anticipate an outcome to change in the time period you are evaluating, the ease of administering the instrument given the staff you have to assess parents and/or children, and the staff you have to score and interpret the results of your findings.