To support Race to the Top—Early Learning Challenge grant recipients’, HFRP produced this selective list of resources about engaging and supporting families with young children. This list of journal articles, practical guides, webinars, and presentations may also be helpful for any other states, districts, and local programs interested in expanding their family engagement work.

HFRP's teaching cases involve real world situations and consider the perspectives of various stakeholders, including early childhood program and elementary school staff, parents, children, and community members. This handout provides a detailed list of our teaching cases on family involvement, focusing on the earlier years of a child's learning and development.

Afterschool Evaluation 101 is a how-to guide for conducting an evaluation. It is designed to help out-of-school time (OST) program directors who have little or no evaluation experience develop an evaluation strategy. The guide will walk you through the early planning stages, help you select the evaluation design and data collection methods that are best suited to your program, and help you analyze the data and present the results.

This new book on family involvement in out-of-school time (OST), edited by former HFRP staff members Holly Kreider and Helen Westmoreland, includes information on promising practices, benefits, and concerns related to family involvement in OST, and features a chapter written by former HFRP staff members Suzanne Bouffard, Kelley O’Carroll, Helen Westmoreland, and Priscilla Little.

Lori Takeuchi—Director of Research for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and author of the recent report Families Matter: Engaging Families in a Digital Age—discusses her research on how children use technology across the various settings of their lives, and the implications of her findings for practitioners who work with young children and their families.

Today’s children and youth are increasingly exposed to new forms of learning beyond the classroom, especially in the form of out-of-school time programs and digital media. Developments in these areas have opened up new ways that families can become involved in their children’s education and development. In this FINE Newsletter Commentary, HFRP’s Heidi Rosenberg and M. Elena Lopez discuss the new roles for families in supporting student learning.

Nita Rudy is a Program Director for the Mississippi Schoolhouse to Statehouse program developed by Parents for Public Schools (PPS), a national organization supporting community-based groups that work with parents to improve public schools. In this Voices from the Field, Nita shares her experience using data to engage families around school improvement efforts.

Eric Dearing, Associate Professor of Applied Developmental Psychology in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, discusses the need to use data-based evidence, rather than intuition, to create successful family and community engagement strategies.

We at Harvard Family Research Project are committed to keeping you up to date on what's new in family involvement. This list of links to current reports, articles, events, and opportunities will help you stay on top of research and resources from HFRP and other field leaders.

One year after the National Policy Forum on Family, School, and Community Engagement, this report looks back at the major themes of the Forum discussions and offers a set of recommendations for driving family engagement in education as we move forward.