A Collaborative Approach to Family Literacy Evaluation Strategies*

Abstract

McCosh Even Start, a federally funded project located at McCosh School in inner‐city Chicago neighborhood, is a partnership between Northeastern Illinois University and The Chicago Public School. The parent#shchild components of the program are: home visiting, an after school family literacy program, parent#shchild field trips, computer classes, and the use of videotaping and photography to document learning. The adult literacy component includes computer, photography and video classes, a parent club for literacy career development skills and parent field trips. Computer, video technology and photography were used as tools to develop literacy, but they were also used to document the literacy progress of parents and children. To evaluate the results of the program, staff, parents, children and a video documenter collaborated to use a wide range of evaluation. These strategies used to show literacy improvement included video documentation and interviews, parent interest questionnaires, observations and book logs, photo collections with personalized captions, portfolios, information reading inventories and parent self‐evaluations. * This research was completed with the help of an Even Start Grant from the Illinois State Board of Education.