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Citation:

Zellman, G. L., Stecher, B., Klein, S., & McCaffrey, D. (1998). Findings from an evaluation of the Parent Institute for Quality Education Parent Involvement Program. Santa Monica, CA: The Rand Corporation. ED429684.

Annotation:
This report by the RAND Corporation evaluates an eight week parenting class for Hispanic parents in California using two different analyses in separate school districts. It is primarily a report on changes in paren behaviors and indirect changes in educational behaviors among their children. In the first district virtually all parent graduates reported substantial changes in their knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Teacher reports of student behavior revealed no effects of parental training attendance. School record data in the second district produced similar findings. An analysis of only Hispanic children, whose parents were the targets of the training, did reveal small, non significant, but consistent improvements in pre-post outcomes between those children with a training graduate parent and those without one. From each of two study schools, in the first school district a total of 65 children of class graduates and 60 other students were randomly selected. Interviews were conducted with their teachers and with about 25 percent of parent graduates. In the second district data from all district elementary schools for two years were analyzed to compare students whose parents completed the program (N=205) with students in the same schools whose parents did not graduate from the training (N=2525). The evaluation points to several suggestions for program improvement: (1) adding a teacher component to the training, (2) more actively monitoring of assigned parent tasks, and (3) differentiation between contact with the school and contact with the teacher, with more emphasis on the latter. This evaluation was constrained by time and limitations of existing data that may have contributed to less accurate results. A more definitive evaluation would include real time interviews in the first district and a random selection of interested parents in the second district comparison study.