This study showcases the collaborative work between, on the one side, the Spanish Ministry of Health, Social Services, and Equality and the Federation of Municipalities and Provinces and, on the other side, a consortium of eight Spanish universities. The aims are to implement a positive parenting policy to adopt codes of professional best…

Recommended early intervention practices emphasize family-centered approaches provided within natural settings through interventionist interactions with caregivers. We defined this approach as participation-based and used the Home Visiting Observation Form (HVOF) and the Natural Environments Rating Scale (NERS) to describe 50 home visits and to…

The Keys to Interactive Parenting Scale (KIPS) is a brief practical tool to assess the quality of parenting interactions across 12 parenting behaviors. Family service providers from a variety of education, health, and social service settings can use KIPS to identify parenting strengths and needs. In this article, the authors describe the rating…

The National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) is addressing problems of evaluation of family literacy programs through portfolio assessment. Beginning in fall 1991, 15 programs began using portfolios to document parent-child interactions. This guide provides a description of the introduction of portfolio assessment into these programs and…

Describes Boston Family Reunification Network's instruments to measure process and clinical outcomes of initiatives designed to help children return to their families, the two-year development process, and the points considered during the instruments' development. Includes suggestions for other social welfare groups planning to create and…

Research is reviewed on the supports provided to parents in the assessment of and intervention with problem behavior of children with mental retardation. It is concluded that while research has made considerable advances, research gaps on the development of practical applications of "parent friendly" programs are still evident. (Contains…

This article examines two programs chosen by the Early Head Start National Resource Center (EHSNRC) Pathways to Prevention (PTP) initiative to participate in a study of their mental health services. Both Wyoming's The Learning Center and Colorado's Developmental Opportunities found that working with the PTP mental health consultant catalyzed…

This volume reports the baseline (1978) data to be used in the 6-year longitudinal evaluation of the Child and Family Resource Program (CFRP). The CFRP, funded in 11 sites across the country as a Head Start demonstration program, is intended to develop models for providing services to low-income families with children from birth to eight years.…

During the 1994-95 program year, the staff of Even Start, a family literacy program in Lincoln (Nebraska), and an evaluator collaborated to create a low-stakes, small-scale portfolio assessment to collect information on program impact. The small scale of the evaluation offered opportunities to involve the staff in each step of the portfolio…