Evaluation of the mothers home teaching program - introduction and background

Special evaluation is based on a series of assessments of and interviews with program beneficiaries; no time frame is given. To evaluate the program's effectiveness in delivering cognitive skills to children and instilling in mothers the willingness to follow non-authoritarian child-rearing options, two groups of mother/child pairs -- a group of 15 from the program and a test group of 10 unenrolled pairs -- were administered a series of tests on a pair by pair basis. The tests were designed to assess or compare: (1) the child's ability to relate familiar objects of two categories into cross-category pairs and to coordinate and construct sets; (2) the mother's ability to construct simple stories from picture sets and relate them to her children; (3) the mother's readiness and preference for non-authoritarian child rearing options; (4) the thematic contents of the mother's interpretation of hypothetical situations involving a child, as expressed in sentence completions to her children; (5) the child's facility and originality in performing the sentence completions following his mother's examples; (6) the child's performance in a group of eight visual discrimination problems; and (7) the incidence of different styles of maternal intervention as the child attempted each problem. The evaluator concluded that program children demonstrated a heightened level of readiness in pre-academic skills in terms of both specific cognitive gains and preparation for new learning experiences. Moreover, while program mothers did not articulate different attitudes concerning childhood and child rearing roles, positive practical differences were demonstrated. Program mothers have emerged with new functional skills and role orientations that support their children's autonomous development and promote their appreciation of their own worth. Program costs compare favorably to less beneficial local school and charitable nursery programs, and program staff appear highly motivated. Supervisors could prove helpful in the future in updating materials.