Parent Evaluations of the Ready! for Kindergarten Program
Introduction: A qualitative program evaluation was conducted to discover which concepts taught in the Ready! for Kindergarten Program were mentioned the most by parents when completing the following statements: 1) Information in this workshop that was useful and interesting includes… and 2) Some things I look forward to doing with my child are…The purpose of this analysis is to see if there were any differences in answers across two program years.
Methodology
The Ready! for Kindergarten Program is an evidence-informed cohort-based program for parents of children birth - 5 to increase their knowledge of child development and learn how to help their child gain skills needed for school. Parents complete 3 workshops of 2 hours each during the year. In FY 2018-2019, 34 English and 26 Spanish post-workshop evaluations were completed by participants in the program. The same evaluations were used with the 2019-2020 parent cohort which included 27 completed in English and 15 in Spanish. The two statements in the overview above are the subject of this analysis since nearly all other evaluation questions received a ranking of 5 out of 5, or “Excellent”.
Analysis
Answers to the two statements of interest were compiled into one document. Content analysis was used to determine themes for concepts reported by parents. Eighteen themes were identified for 2018-2019 and sixteen for 2019-2020. Many participants chose not to answer or responded generally such as “everything” to the questions rather than being specific.
Discussion
The purpose of this qualitative program evaluation is to discover any differences in responses to the statements above. The Ready! for Kindergarten program includes most of the same people in both years since parents participate in a cohort and attend workshops based on the age of their child. A new parent cohort is created each year for those with children birth – 1. In each year, the top concepts identified were the same. The center graph shows that in 2019-2020, parents increased their mentions of letters/alphabet almost by almost 2 times and numbers/math more than 2 times compared to 2018-2019. This may reflect an increase in workshop emphasis on those concepts or other influences over parent interest in those subjects.
