As part of the Play to Learn initiative, with funding from the LEGO foundation, BRAC and Sesame Workshop designed a 6-month fathers’ engagement component to be added to an existing parenting intervention for mothers. The program was developed for fathers of children aged 0-3 in the Rohingya camps and surrounding host communities in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, and focuses on mental health, responsive caregiving, and engagement with family. As part of an impact evaluation of the intervention1, we at Global TIES, New York University, developed an instrument to measure the quality of the intervention delivery.

This brief discusses the importance of measuring quality, the process of developing and implementing this quality instrument, and the preliminary analysis of data collected using it. In addition to informing the impact evaluation, a broader goal of this work is to contribute to the emerging knowledge on measuring program quality and fidelity, particularly in low and middle income countries (LMIC) and emergency contexts, and better understand “how” and “why” parenting programs in these contexts do or do not work.

With Sustainable Development Goal 4, the global education community promises to improve equitable access to quality education for all children. This promise can only be upheld through investments by multiple stakeholders in the most educationally marginalized children: the 75 million children who are currently out of school—and the millions more who are in school but not learning—in crisis contexts. For researchers working in partnership with practitioners and governments, investments are needed to develop and adapt measurement tools that provide accurate and timely data about critical dimensions of program implementation (PI) and children’s holistic learning and development (CHILD) in crisis contexts. Such tools can be used in both research efforts and embedded in practitioner monitoring and evaluation systems, resulting in data that can: a) improve the ability of researchers to detect impacts and interpret results of randomized trials of education programs; and b) guide practitioners in data-driven quality improvement efforts. In Paper 1 of this dissertation, I apply theories and evidence from the prevention and intervention, developmental, and implementation sciences to outline how research-practice-policy partnerships can make strategic and coordinated progress towards developing and adapting CHILD and PI measurement tools. In Papers 2 and 3, I provide empirical evidence on the psychometric properties of two such measurement tools: one developed in Western countries and used widely in humanitarian contexts to assess a key dimension of CHILD (social-emotional well-being) and one developed in a crisis context to assess a key dimension of PI (classroom implementation quality). Specifically, in Paper 2 I provide some of the first evidence of the reliability, validity, and cross-contextual comparability of the teacher-report version of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (Goodman, 1997) within and across three humanitarian contexts. In Paper 3, I provide initial evidence of the content and predictive validity of an observation tool developed by staff at the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to assess the quality of classroom implementation of Learning in a Healing Classroom, the IRC’s teacher professional development and curricular program. Implications of the findings of each of the studies for research-practice-policy partnerships are discussed within each paper and cumulatively.