Working with Parents
Authentic Assessment in Family Literacy Programs

Pauline O’Leary
Even Start Family Literacy Program
Dorchester, MA

Barbara Krol-Sinclair
Intergenerational Literacy Project
Chelsea, MA

During the Partnership Project, Barbara Krol-Sinclair and Pauline O’Leary worked together to develop a tool that would help parents set goals with their children and measure the achievement of those goals. It was a way to encourage parents to take an active role in planning and evaluating their literacy practices with their children.

Both of us work in family literacy programs operating in the Boston area. Pauline’s program is an Even Start project in its third year and is located at the ABCD building on Geneva Avenue in Dorchester. The pro-gram is targeted at Head Start parents and their children. Together, Even Start parents and staff work to create an environment which nurtures self-confidence. In the program, parents focus on their own reading, writing, math and English skills. They gain an awareness and understanding of their children’s learning and how to continue the family’s education at home. Two classes are offered, one for parents whose first language is English, the other for families for whom English is a second language. A total of 40 families are served by the program.

Barbara’s program, the Intergenera-tional Literacy Project in Chelsea — in its sixth year of operation — is a collaborative effort of the Chelsea Public Schools and Boston University School of Education. The program is designed to help parents and other adult family members strengthen their own literacy and enhance the strategies they use in literacy interactions with their children. Flexible grouping and cooperative learning are emphasized in instruction, and materials include a range of articles of adult interest, brochures on family literacy and children’s storybooks. Four multi-level, multi-lingual classes are offered, serving 100 families, for most of whom English is a second language.

In beginning work as a mentoring team, we had an advantage over pairs who were unfamiliar with each other’s work. First of all, we already knew each other: we had met several times over the past few years at sharing meetings for family literacy programs at the Adult Literacy Resource Institute and have some familiarity with each other’s pro-grams and the issues we each face, both practical (such as space limitations) and philosophical (including the ongoing question of how best to meet the diverse needs and interests of learners).

Our second bond was that Pauline had visited Barbara’s program two years before and had an understanding of how that program operates.

Most importantly, both programs focus on promoting family literacy. While there are some very different approaches to intergenerational literacy across many programs, the two of us are fortunate to share a common view of the families with whom we work, the role of our programs and of effective approaches for facilitating literacy practices within families. We both believe that family literacy programs can best meet the needs of participating families by building on the literacy interactions already in place in the home.

The result is that we were both delighted to have the opportunity to work together on this project.

The Initial Meeting
Before the entire group of partners met in January, we decided to have Barbara visit Pauline’s program. After class ended, we sat down to discuss our programs, including their objectives, schedules, the activities emphasized —and assessment.

For both of our family literacy programs, one of the primary functions of assessment tools is to increase parents’ metacognitive awareness of the literacy activities they’re engaging in with their children on a regular basis, that is, to help parents learn to value what they’re already doing with their children, and to expand the range of strategies and activities they use in interacting with their children.

We determined that whatever assessment tool we came up with, it must serve to inform parents about their strengths and needs in developing literacy activities in which to engage with their children, in addition to demonstrating change to the teacher and the program.

Goal-setting
Pauline’s program is two-pronged, directed toward both helping parents focus on their own literacy development and working with parents to aid them in planning and carrying out literacy activities with their children. During the time parents are on-site, they take part in a literacy class, work with their teacher in planning for the Parent and Child Together time (P.A.C.T.), and the P.A.C.T. session itself, a block of time in which parents engage in activities with their children that encourage a sense of discovery and play and improve parent-child communication.

We decided to limit the scope of the project at this point to developing a tool that could be used by parents in planning for and assessing their activities with their children during the P.A.C.T. Pauline was interested in helping parents target their goals for a session and to determine how they would accomplish these objectives. She especially wanted parents to develop skills necessary to evaluate the success of the sessions afterwards. Barbara’s experience in family literacy has been limited to her own program, so she was excited about the prospect of adapting ideas she had had success with to another program format.

Initial planning
Our next meeting, also held at Pauline’s program, was devoted to brainstorming. Pauline discussed the P.A.C.T. sessions, how they were conducted and the assessment that was currently in place (see Figure 1).

One of her concerns was that, although parents were actively planning for their sessions with their children, after the P.A.C.T. they were not using what they had learned from the session in planning for future P.A.C.T.s. Parents didn’t seem connected enough to the activities or confident enough in their own abilities to be able to explain what had been effective and what they needed to work on next.

We tossed around ideas for developing a form that would allow parents to make the connections between the activities that they were engaging in in the program (in the P.A.C.T. session) and at home, to begin to recognize a continuum in their children’s learning, connectedness between individual literacy activities and P.A.C.T. sessions.

Refining
In our next meeting, we determined the exact design of the form (see Figure 3) building on one already in use (Figure 2). Our previous session had consisted of the two of us tossing out ideas and building on them. This time, we sat down and wrote out how we wanted the form to look and focused on the exact wording we felt would best help parents in assessing what they were doing with their children.

We assigned outselves the task of focusing specifically on the form previously in use, what we wanted to know, and how it could be changed to give more useful information to the parents, the teacher and the program. Both of us seemed to feel that our intuitive brilliance of the last meeting had somehow slipped away, but we came up with a workable tool.

Testing out
Because of problems in getting together, Pauline was only able to pilot the resulting assessment tool for three weeks, not ideal but enough to give us an idea of its strengths and weaknesses. We were unable, given the time constraints, to meet with participating parents to determine their views on the two forms and how they might help parents in their literacy interactions with their children.

Pauline found that the new assessment tool was disappointingly similar to the form she had previously been using, in that parents were completing it in the same way. With both forms, parents were putting most of their effort into their planning for the day’s session (before P.AC.T.). In describing “What I did” and “How I did it”, on both the old and new tools parents were writing answers of only one or a few words.

The new format had not provided parents with a clearer way in which to describe their interactions with their child or to analyze the strategies they had used in the activity. Pauline felt that possibly parents still had difficulty in reporting what they had done after the session because they had already described their activities in writing before the P.AC.T. session; they saw no need to duplicate their efforts.

There were some significant areas of difference between the old and new tools, however. Our new form had added the phrase, “this week I wanted to help my child...” Pauline felt that this prompt helped parents to focus and report their objectives more clearly. In addition, the new tool provided a more structured framework and a better layout, and employed language that the parents were more likely to use. Most importantly, in using the new assess-ment tool parents were focused for the first time on setting goals for themselves and their children in their next P.A.C.T. session.

On the original form used by parents after P.A.C.T., all wording was in second person, i.e. “you”. In the tool we created, we changed the wording to first person, “I”. We hoped that this change would empower the parents who were analyz-ing their P.AC.T. sessions, to give them the sense that they were in control of their interactions with their children.

In setting agendas for the future, we hope that we can use this new tool to assist parents in carrying their self assessment of their activities with their children into their daily routines at home, and we believe that the new tool is better suited to such an extension because the parent is, in essence, analyzing her activities for her own reflection and use in setting future agendas; even though program staff also has access to the form, the parent is writing for her own authentic use and not merely as a report to the outside authority.

We also feel that our new tool helps parents to better link their individual sessions — that we have succeeded in building awareness of a learning continuum since now, at the end of one session, parents are focused on what they might want to do the next time.

Conclusions
One tool—one piece of paper—may not seem like a substantial outcome from half a year’s worth of meetings and phone calls. We’re tempted to become defensive, but it’s clear to us that the nature of collaboration requires a great deal of groundwork. We could easily have made minor adaptations to tools already in use in Barbara’s program. Our goal, however, was to begin to build a new model for parents to use in assessing their literacy interactions with their children. In that, we feel that we’ve succeeded. In addition, we have engaged in a great deal of reflection on the processes we engage in with our participating families on a regular basis and the role of parents in setting their own literacy agendas. Such insights help us to continually assess our own behaviors and to revise our interactions with families.

Next steps
Even though the project has officially ended, we intend to continue working together in the fall. We would like to make further refinements to the tool we’ve tested, as well as look for additional ways to help parents assess and reflect on their literacy interactions with their children and their own literacy development. Through interviews with participating parents, we would like to get their input into ways to help them assess the strategies they use in their interactions with their children. In addition, we’d like to develop is a method to help parents systematically monitor their literacy activities at home. For both of us, the goals are to validate the literacy activities in which families engage in the home, to help parents systematize the process of assessing their literacy interactions with their children and to inevitably make our formalized programs of reflection family literacy redundant for participating families. We have only begun the process.

This article was published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 7 (December 1994), SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 1994.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.