Email to National Centers

Early Childhood Training and Technical Assistance (T/TA) Cross-System

Evaluation Project

Appendix A1: Email Invitation for National Center Semi-Structured Interviews

To: National Center Evaluators

Subject: Invitation to Discuss ACF’s Early Childhood Training and Technical Assistance (T/TA) System

[GREETING]

Our staff from NORC enjoyed meeting many of you at the most recent meeting of the National Centers Evaluators Group! NORC is designing an evaluation to document and assess the processes, resources, and services constituting ACF’s Early Childhood Training and Technical Assistance System. To learn more, we are scheduling discussions to provide our team with critical input for designing a cross-system evaluation that can also support your Center’s continuous improvement efforts. Please know that your participation is voluntary and choosing not to participate will have no bearing on your participation and access to the research resources developed as a result of these discussions.

To schedule a discussion, please email us your availability for a 90 minute telephone discussion during the next two weeks. Once we hear back from you, we will email you different times when we are also available.

To be respectful of the time commitment involved and the busy schedules you have, our hope is that you will be able to identify a single individual to represent your organization for this call. If that’s not possible, just let us know, and we can work with you to make sure the appropriate individuals are involved. We look forward to speaking with you further and learning more about your T/TA services and evaluation activities and interests. Below, we include a more detailed list of topics we hope to cover during our discussion. If there is someone else on your team that you feel is better able to address these topics, please feel free to forward this email. The information collected through this effort will be used for internal purposes to design the cross-system evaluation study and to develop resources to support evaluation activities among T/TA system stakeholders. We will protect individually identifiable information and will summarize responses when we share findings internally with T/TA stakeholders, ACF Federal Staff, and a Technical Expert Panel. The information we collect will not be released to the public.

We look forward to sharing what we learn with the Evaluators’ Group and working together to understand the implications for a national evaluation and for Center-specific evaluation activities. As always, please let us know if you have any questions!

Thank you, 

Carrie and Marc

Co-Principal Investigators of the Early Childhood T/TA Cross-System Evaluation Project

An agency may not conduct or sponsor, and a person is not required to respond to, a collection of information unless it displays a currently valid OMB control number. The OMB number for this information collection is 0970-0356 and the expiration date is 03/31/2018.

DISCUSSION TOPICS FOR INTERVIEWS WITH NATIONAL CENTERS

During the interview, we hope to learn more from you about several areas related to [CENTER]’s work, including:

• Your Center’s short- and long-term goals, and how they align and differ with those of the broader EC T/TA system;

• Your Center’s stakeholders, how you assess their needs, and how you adapt your services as a result;

• The specific T/TA services your Center provides and what if any records you maintain in regard to service provision and recipient feedback;

• Specific outcomes your Center measures, the data you collect, and analyses you conduct to assess progress toward Center goals;

• How your Center disseminates information and evaluates dissemination efficacy;

• Your perceptions of the quality and utility of the evaluation data you use;

• How you evaluate the effectiveness of your Center’s T/TA efforts and your views on the effectiveness of those efforts;

• The data systems your Center uses to make available and document the use of your Center’s T/TA services, tool and resources;

• Who uses your data;

• What additional research, data resources or tools could better support your Center’s activities; and

• Your general impressions about the T/TA system;

• Your thoughts and ideas for a useful cross-system evaluation.