Greater Twin Cities United Way, Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood: NdCAD-Sankofa

The Sankofa reading program is a culturally-based literacy tutoring program for children of African-descent designed to close the achievement gap in reading skills. The program consists of comprehensive after-school tutoring with strong reading and cultural components. Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood (SPPN) partnered with Network for the Development of Children of African Descent (NdCAD) to deliver Sankofa to low-performing readers enrolled in kindergarten through third grade from 2013-2017 in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota.

Study Goals

The goal of the study is to evaluate the NdCAD’s Sankofa program that was implemented in the SPPN area from spring 2013 through fall 2017.

Research Questions

This evaluation included an implementation evaluation and an impact evaluation. The research questions were:

Implementation Questions:

• Is the Sankofa program being implemented as intended?
• Is the Sankofa program delivery consistent with the intended program structure?
• Has the Sankofa program achieved its intended implementation output and goals?
• What program services are received by the comparison groups?
• What are reasons why participants do not complete Sankofa?
• What is the average number of follow-ups (by NdCAD tutors and/or SPPN School Partnership Coordinators) before participants discontinue the program?

Impact Questions:

• Do children who participate in Sankofa exhibit:
  • Increased reading performance as identified by pre-post program scores on the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA)?
  • Greater levels of social emotional development such as confidence in reading after the nine-week program?
  • Greater rates of literacy growth after completing Sankofa, compared with their growth before program participation, according to FastBridge Learning reading measures?
• How do children who complete Sankofa perform on third-grade reading proficiency measures?
• Do children who complete Sankofa perform better on third-grade reading proficiency measures than similar children in Saint Paul Public Schools?
• Do African-centered and African-theme texts change participants’ attitudes about reading?
• How does having (African/African American) tutors change parent involvement in improving child’s literacy?

Findings

The evaluation found the following:

• The preliminary impact evaluation design found 90 percent of Sankofa participants increased their reading performance on the DRA II by at least one reading level over the course of the program:
  • The percent of students below the soft-target grade-appropriate reading level likewise decreased for all grades (K-3).
  • These findings from the preliminary evidence design lacked a comparison group and suffered from limited internal validity (as the increase could have been caused by external factors or normative growth).
• The moderate evidence impact evaluation design found a significant effect of Sankofa on growth in reading for the Decodable Words assessment using an ITS design (moderate level of evidence design), but not for the Letter Sounds or Sight Word assessments. However, this effect for Decodable Words was not significant after correcting for multiple comparisons (suggesting this finding could have been obtained by chance) and it was not corroborated by the multiple imputation pooled analysis.
• For the exploratory matched-comparison design:
  • In Years 1 and 2, there were no effects of Sankofa on MCA-Reading scores.
  • In Years 3 and 4, a significant difference was found.
  • On average, Sankofa participants were expected to score 7.25 points lower on the MCA than the non-Sankofa SPPS comparison.

For more information, download the full report and report brief.