What is the impact of home visiting on school readiness?
Head Start for Kent County (HS4KC) wanted to expand services for children ages 0-3 to address the community need for quality infant-toddler care. In accordance with the Head Start for School Readiness Act of 2007 and Head Start Program Performance Standards, HS4KC evaluates child outcomes data identifying strengths and areas of continuous improvement to ensure school readiness. HS4KC wanted to evaluate how three-year-old preschool children scored on school readiness measures compared to those who previously participated in the Early Head Start home visiting program.
By comparing these graphs, HS4KC was able to document that three-year-old preschool children who participated in the Early Head Start home visiting program scored higher on the school readiness measure compared to their peers across all domains.
Analysis
HS4KC generated data from the Comparative Report utilizing the Teaching Strategies Gold software application and used this information to create a bar graph in Microsoft Excel. The bar chart displays the percentage of three-year-old children who fall below, meet, or exceed Widely Held Expectations for areas of development and learning.
This analysis includes children who had finalized data for all checkpoint periods and were enrolled in the program at the end of the year. School readiness data was displayed and compared for children who participated in the EHS program with those who did not. By analyzing the comparison groups, preschool children who were previously enrolled in EHS outperformed their peers in all areas of development and learning. Although preschool teachers reported similar qualitative data, there is value to the quantitative data which helps to analyze the value of EHS and the level of impact.
In this example, the graph shows three-year-old children who participated in EHS, but HS4KC also generates similar charts to evaluate end of year child outcomes for children transitioning to kindergarten and comparing years of participation in the program.
Result
HS4KC was able to document that three-year-old Head Start preschool children who participated in the Early Head Start home visiting program scored higher on the school readiness measure compared to their peers across all domains.
Additional Details
Audience: Leadership, management, direct staff, board/policy council
Level of Analysis: Program, sub-groups
Difficulty: Moderate
Content Area: Education and child development
Data Sources: Teaching Strategies, Microsoft Excel
Considerations and Caveats: Teaching Strategies Gold (TSG) offers a variety of reports and selection criteria. It is essential to have a clearly defined question and to understand the varying purposes of TSG reports prior to selecting a report and generating data. Data was reported at a program level and included the same group of children enrolled throughout the school year. This data would not be used to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of individual teachers or account for children who dropped from the program. Although this chart only represents one program year, it is beneficial to look at data trends for multiple years.
A similar approach can be followed for evaluating school readiness for children transitioning to kindergarten and comparing results to the years of program participation.In this example, the results were positive and the Head Start preschool children who participated in the Early Head Start home visiting program outperformed their peers. Had the outcomes yielded different results, it would be beneficial to engage in further discussions, develop a hypothesis, and disaggregate data accordingly.
Technical Appendix
The Comparative Reports as described by Teaching Strategies, are generated by administrators after a checkpoint period to compare checkpoint data from multiple checkpoint periods. By selecting the “children in all checkpoint periods” criteria, the same group of children can be compared. The color green was chosen for the visualizations to represent the three-year-old green color band in TSG. By utilizing, the “manage custom funding sources,” organizations can add, edit, and delete indicators.
Prior to Generating Report
A TSG Administrator needs to create a funding source from the license settings/view license information section. For this purpose, “EHS” was used as a means of labeling and tracking children that transitioned from Early Head Start to Preschool.
Generating the Reports in TSG: Two reports are needed
To generate the first report for all preschool children in the green color band:
Select Report tab and choose “Comparative”
Select the following criteria:
Checkpoint Period: Current and all previous checkpoints for the current program year
Areas of Development and Learning: Check all boxes except Spanish Language and Spanish Literacy
Select Children: All desired sites
Compare To: Widely Held Expectations
Age or Class/Grade: Green – Preschool 3 class/grade
Include: Finalized Checkpoint Level
Children To Compare: Children in All Checkpoint Periods
Report Level: Program, Group Data by Checkpoint Period
Select “Generate Report”
To generate the second report for preschool children who transitioned from Early Head Start program:
Follow all of the steps listed above
Select the additional criteria
Child Demographics
Funding Sources: “EHS”
Generating the Column Graph in Excel: (download the template here)
To create the column representing the EHS children:
Enter the percentages from the second report directly into Excel
To create the column representing the “No EHS” children:
Subtract the data on the second report (# below, # meeting, # exceeding, and # of children) from the data on the first report
Using the # of children as the divisor, determine the percentages for # below, # meeting, and # exceeding
Enter percentages for “No-EHS” children into Excel
Questions about this use case? Email them to analytics@nhsa.org and we’ll get in touch with the author for you!