In essence, at the same time that we begin to ask questions about how to document an aspect of our family literacy program, we must be prepared to inquire about the program activity itself and the ways in which we engage our learners in the family contexts of literacy learning. What questions and objectives would you select in reviewing your assessment strategies within an EPE scheme for your own family literacy initiative?

For example, suppose you review a progress monitoring strategy which counts the number of books signed out to a family for a program which includes objectives for parent-child home reading. How do you know what parent-child home reading has actually occurred? Are you satisfied with the level of parent involvement in the book drop-off program? Are you able to keep track of questions posed by families? To answer these questions which relate to family literacy interaction within a program, practitioners may wish to supplement the book count strategy with another approach with can document how families use the books.

Review current evaluation routines from an EPE perspective to design or adapt program activities and procedures for collecting information.

The family literacy evaluation process is more than simply adding a parent survey to obtain an estimate of family satisfaction with the program. We should also be prepared to ask about and show the ways we directly communicate with those caregivers and involve them in program activities over the course of the program. We should be able to identify program activities which explicitly link literacy learning to family literacy in the home. When the program targets adults only, evaluation strategies should obtain an estimate of the effectiveness of using "family focus" strategies in fostering adult literacy.

Using a problem solving approach in family literacy evaluation means asking hard questions about what we are doing in our programs on a day to day basis and opening our practices to scrutiny within our evaluation teams. We know that family literacy represents a different approach to literacy practice and a different mindset in thinking of the literacy learner as a caregiver first and of how to include parent and child together as learners. As practitioners interested in family literacy, we know that we are on new ground when we aim to redefine program literacy experiences for families rather than individual learners.