A few notes on attendance:
The high number of participants and contact hours for Year 1 resulted from implementing Family Science at a large number of schools–a number that ultimately proved to be too large to effectively deliver the courses. For the following two years we focused on reaching a more manageable number of schools, and for Year 4, we shared responsibility for recruitment and retention with parent volunteers and school administration which resulted in an increase in participants.
- Year 4 in New York saw a large increase in the number of participants as we extended an invitation to participate to schools in the immediate neighborhood surrounding NYSCI.
- For Year 4, both location shared recruitment and retention responsibilities with parent volunteers and school administration, which resulted in an increase in participants.
- Retention has been a challenge over the course of the program. In 2014, only about 30% of the participants in LA were returning from previous years. Multiple factors contribute to low retention, among them students moving onto middle school, students losing interest in science, conflicts on specific days of the week and competing after school programs.
Contact Hours
If you’re curious about how we collect this data, we invite you to learn more about Keytag, the program we developed to track student learning and attendance.