Facts In Action

Making it Count is a series of articles designed to help you develop ways to measure outcomes in your program or family child care home. If you would like to receive earlier issues of Making it Count, please contact Erika Argersinger at (617) 695-0700 x271, or by email at eargersinger@associatedearlycareandeducation.org.

In the last two installments of Making it Count, we discussed issues to consider when creating an outcome measurement instrument and developing a step-by- step plan for collecting data. Once you have collected data, the next steps in your outcome measurement system are to analyze the data and report on your findings. By analyzing your data, you will learn whether you collected all the data you need to measure the outcomes you selected and whether your data collection instruments make it easy to tabulate your findings. By reporting on your data, you can give feedback to providers in order to assist them in programming based on children's needs, as well as to other stakeholders to give them an appreciation of what your program does.

The first task in analyzing data is developing a system to extract it from your outcome measurement instrument - or "data processing." Processing the data means transferring the information recorded on outcome measurement instruments and other documents to either a computer or a new form that helps you summarize the data. The data obtained on each child for each outcome indicator need to be added together to provide the overall value for that indicator for the reporting period. Most outcome indicators are expressed as the number and the percentage of something, such as the number and percentage of children that showed improvement in a particular development skill.

Once you have processed and summarized the data, it is helpful to report your findings in a way that is clear and understandable, such as with data tables or graphs, and that allows you to make comparisons over time. In addition, when presenting your findings, it is useful to provide discussions or explanations of your findings to help put them in context. If you are reporting your findings to stakeholders outside of your program, it is important to protect the confidentiality of the children and families. One way to do this is to summarize data based on groups (such as the percentage of the entire class who have achieved a particular skill) rather than presenting data on individual children.

If you feel that your program does not have the capacity to do this type of analysis or summary, you may be able to find some one to help you out at a local college or university. Try contacting local Departments of Education, Psychology, or Statistics at colleges or universities to see if there are any students who need data for projects who would be willing to help out in exchange. Finally, the timing of when you analyze data is entirely a programmatic decision depending on when it would be useful to have that information. The goal of your outcome measurement system should be to give meaningful feedback to providers so that it can be useful to them while they are still working with the children in question.

Once you have analyzed and reported on your findings, you have completed all of the steps in developing an outcome measurement system. The final article in this series on developing an outcome measurement system will discuss reevaluating and improving on your system.

Sources:
Measuring Program Outcomes: A Practical Approach, United Way of America, 1996; Outcome Measurement in Child Care Programs: A Workbook for Practitioners, United Way of Massachusetts Bay, 2000.

See also— ABCD Head Start (www.factsinaction.org/mcount/mcjun012.htm)

Facts in Action, June 2001