Digging into the Data

Making Data-Informed Decisions in Head Start

Do parents report feeling support in the areas that your program focuses on the most? Are you hounding parents in areas that they already feel are strong, when there is an opportunity to instead focus your efforts on topics where they want more support?

The questions are endless and Parent Gauge can help you answer them!

One of the great features of Parent Gauge is that it provides programs with actionable data to inform their parent engagement efforts. Especially with the data tours in the new monitoring protocol and a push from the Office of Head Start to be making data-informed decisions, this is an important tool for programs to have in their arsenal.

Parent Gauge is unique in that it goes further than any other existing tool. It doesn’t just ask families yes or no questions about whether they have stable housing and adequate food. Parent Gauge goes beyond that, measuring parents’ strengths and identifying how well your program’s efforts are responding, all the while still allowing staff to learn about those immediate housing and food needs.

How do you then look at this data and turn it into insights?

There are many ways to slice and dice and dig into the data to identify where your program can have the greatest impact for families. Take a look below at just a few of the ways you can use your Parent Gauge data.

Program-wide Summary

The most basic way to look at your data, to get a preliminary sense of where your families are and how you are performing as a program, is to look at the Baseline Report. For each question, you’ll see an average score between 1 (not at all) to 5 (very much.)

Just looking at this program example, you can see that parents report “mostly” setting aside time to read with their child and that the program heavily encourages them to do so. Parent Gauge allows your program to set a goal that as the year goes on, the “action” score will increase as parents learn more and more through Head Start about the importance of reading regularly with their child. If the score doesn’t change, that might indicate parents would benefit from your programming revising its efforts in this area. Families seem to feel the program is encouraging them, but if it’s not changing their actions, another approach might be necessary.

Slicing and Dicing

Once you know how your program’s family engagement efforts rate overall, Parent Gauge also gives you the opportunity to slice and dice the data by different populations. Are there significant differences in responses between those in Head Start and those in Early Head Start? What about children with and without disabilities? Those served in center-based and home-based settings? Once center versus another? Parent Gauge includes a variety of categories to filter on so you can be as general or as specific as you want in looking at the data.

A subpopulation you might be particularly interested in when it comes to reading is home language. Looking at one program’s data in this graphic, we see information they can act on immediately. While both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking families report the program encourages them at the same level (4.69 and 4.72 are very close), they report actually setting time aside to read at very different levels.

From here, you have to continue to ask questions. If parents are receiving the same encouragement, why are their actions different? Do the Spanish-speaking families have enough books at home to read with their children? Do the parents not know how important and positive it is for their children to be bilingual, so they don’t want to read to them in Spanish but don’t know how to read to them in English?

Ask questions. Talk to families. Understand what you can do better.

Individual Drill-Down

To continue this example, if you want to know who to talk to in order to understand why your program isn’t having as much impact on Spanish-speaking parents, just click on the question in blue to see the distribution in responses.

While 32 of the 62 Spanish-speaking families “very much” set aside time to read with their children, 25 only said “somewhat” and 5 even said “not very much.”

You can click on “not very much” to see exactly which families gave that response, so you can connect with them and understand how you can better support them.

Look at your practice overall. Slice and dice away. Dig into individual questions.

Learn more at go.nhsa.org/parent-gauge or order now. Subscriptions are open for both this current school year and the next!

Victoria Jones is NHSA’s Senior Manager of Data. Victoria supports the Head Start field’s efforts to advance child and family outcomes by helping Head Start programs move towards a culture of continuous quality improvement. Her portfolio includes leading the Data Design Initiative, working on the Parent Gauge team, and contributing to other projects that directly support practitioners in the field.