No data present at this time

• The slight trend upward in post-assessment scores for the questions activity could have been based on students remembering the answers to a couple of questions, rather than being indicative of a true increase in the competency in identifying strong questions. The two-point Likert scale with the choices of "strong" and "weak" also threatens the validity of the results, as students stood a mathematical chance of getting 50 percent of the items correct just by guessing. Finally, the lack of having students explain their reasoning for categorizing questions as weak or strong limits the usefulness of the assessment results. Also, given that the pre-assessment had no identifiers attached, the evaluator was not able to further analyze performance on this task by other factors, such as attendance and gender. Competency assessments items in the future will have individual identifiers.
• Parents offered two minor suggestions for improvement during their focus group session. These suggestions included: 1) incorporating more activities to better orient them to the coach prior to the first academic-year meeting with their child, such as ice-cream socials and 2) incorporating one or two activities earlier in the year for parents to better learn about each other, as well as what the coaches do with their children. The project leaders have already responded by including events earlier in the school calendar year.

• Keeping track of highly mobile families is a real challenge in our program. One effective way we found to supplement our communication efforts was through the phonevite.com. It is free (for cluster calls of 20 and under) and has lots of great features like knowing when people pick up the message, how long they listen to it, and whether they call back.
• People love to look at pictures of themselves and their friends. We help keep the families hooked in by posting pictures from almost every event on our Picasa web album: http://picasaweb.google.com/dsteinmeister. They can download the pictures and our Scholars can walk their parents through their adventures.

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