As states, tribes and communities continue to build the evidence base for the effectiveness of IECMHC in early care and education settings, a common question is: which tools should we be using to measure impact?
This Choose and Use interactive search engine is designed to help you plan for capturing data on outcomes of IECMHC. We have summarized key information about measures that have been used previously in two or more IECMHC program evaluations to assess child, teacher, teacher-child relationship and classroom/program level impacts.
Data collection for IECMHC should not be limited to the measures highlighted here; in fact, all programs are strongly encouraged to collect additional data. The measures described here represent OUTCOME measures (i.e., how IECMHC impacts children, classrooms, etc.). In addition to outcome data, it is important for programs to collect IMPLEMENTATION data (e.g., how is IECMHC being implemented) and PROCESS data (e.g., what are the proximal impacts of IECMHC that lead to these more distal outcomes).
Because of wide ranging racial/ethnic disparities in access to opportunities that many families that utilize IECMHC face, programs and systems leaders should ensure that demographic data are always collected and that IECMHC outcome, process, and implementation data are always disaggregated by race/ethnicity, income, language and disability status.
Decisions about evaluation are best made in the context of your programs’ theory of change, setting, and populations served, so it is important to choose measures, to the extent possible, that have been normed on the populations served and that are available in a language that families understand.
In addition to using the Choose and Use Guide, we recommend you also contact the CoE to request technical assistance to refine your decisions about which tools to select.
Instructions: You can search in two different ways. Use the first search to find tools that meet your specific needs by choosing characteristics about the intended audience or characteristics about the tool. Use the second search to search by tool name to find details on over 20 tools that have been collected.
If you want to access specific details for each tool, choose that tool below.