Every lesson plan in the Practical Parent Education curriculum includes an evaluation instrument to measure the effectiveness of the class taught.  These evaluations have yielded results in actual case studies of 99% increase in knowledge and 97% increase in new parenting skills learned.

The evaluation instruments for Practical Parent Education are designed to help you determine the effectiveness of your program and to help you determine ways to make it better.  Basing your grant application outcomes on the results that are measured with these tools can make your grant writing, outcome documentation, and reporting easy.  Evaluation results are valuable tools for defending your parent education/parent involvement programs to your funders.

Single Class Evaluation:

We know that we cannot expect significant long term change in parenting practices from a parent’s participation in one class; however, we can measure a parent’s increase in knowledge about the topic with pre and post content questions for each module.

The questions for each module are taken from the lesson content and from the extenders and activities.  A form, Practical Parent Education Outcome Measures; Pre-Lesson and Post Lesson Scores is provided for you to use in recording and calculating the results.  The data collected can give you the participant’s average percent of change in knowledge for each class.

Series Evaluations:

When parents have participated in a series of classes, usually six to eight lessons, the Series Evaluation is appropriate.  It will record the participant’s assessment of four things:

1.       1.  How useful the content of the lessons is/will be

2.       2.  How many useful skills he/she learned in the series

3.       3.  How the participant’s confidence level changed during the series

4.       4.  The participant’s intent to make positive changes in his/her parenting practices

The results from that evaluation tool can be tallied on the Practical Parent Education Series Evaluation Summary. 

Proven Effectiveness:  Report Using PPE Evaluation Tools

The following summary reflects the results from the evaluation tools included in the PPE curriculum using actual data collected from parents after they had attended at least four parenting classes taught by five trained PPE facilitators over a three year period.

Knowledge

17% reported that they had learned one or two things that would be useful to them as they parented their children

82% reported that they had learned a lot of information that they would use.

 Skills

19% reported that they had acquired one or two skills that they would find useful

78% reported that they had learned several strategies that would be useful to them

 Attitude/Confidence

40% reported that they felt a little more confident as a parent than before the classes

57% reported that they felt significantly more confident in their parenting practices

Intended Practice

24% had identified at least one new strategy that they planned to implement with their children

73% planned to use two or more new positive strategies with their children