All about the content, calculations, and composition of the LENA Grow Impact Report
Designed with stakeholders in mind, the Impact Report describes LENA Grow, defines turns, explains the importance of interactive talk, and displays your program’s outcome data within that context to show your program’s influence on the communities you serve.Click to jump to a topic, or use Ctrl+F to search this article.
| Child Equity |
| Teachers |
| By the Numbers |
| Turns Change: All Children |
| Reference Benchmarks |
| Description, Stats, and Inclusion Details |
| Data Inclusion Rules |
| Pre/Post Calculations |
Child Equity
LENA Grow is designed to encourage equitable talk environments, with the goal that no child should spend the day in language isolation — real or relative.
The Child Equity section of the report measures your program’s impact on "talk equity" by zeroing in on two segments of children:
- Children experiencing less interaction than their same-room peers.
- Children experiencing less interaction than the national median.
The graphs compare children's first LENA Day in a group versus their last LENA Days in that group. See the section on Pre/Post calculations for more detail on how we arrive at these numbers.
See the section on inclusion rules for the specific criteria that characterize a child as Bottom Third or Experiencing Low Talk.
Refer to the third page of your Impact Report to find the number of children in each segment.
Teachers
The Teachers section shows the percent of responding teachers who agreed or strongly agreed with five target outcome statements on the post-sequence survey.
The n is the number of teachers who responded to the question.
At least 5 teacher responses are required in order to present the data. This requirement is necessary to preserve teacher anonymity and to ensure the reported % is meaningful.
A teacher does not need to be certified to complete the survey.
By the Numbers
The By the Numbers section shows the total scope of your program’s impact in the date range you specify:
- Total count of closed classroom groups that completed at least one LENA Day within your report parameters.
- Number of children in these groups.
- Number of teachers in these groups.
These groups, children, and teachers are eligible for inclusion in the pre/post impact evaluations if inclusion criteria are met.
Turns Change: All Children
This section shows average change in turns per hour for all children included in the sample, and how your program's turns change compares to that of all other LENA Grow programs.
See the section on Pre/Post calculations for more detail on how we arrive at these numbers.
Reference Benchmarks
The benchmarks graphic puts your turns data into context: what hundreds of thousands of hours of LENA data indicate is typical across all child care settings, and what LENA data and research indicate is optimal.
Description, Stats, and Inclusion Details
The third page of the report describes LENA Grow, defines turns, explains the importance of interactive talk, and displays your program’s outcome data within that context.
Although it's not eye-catching, if you are trying to quickly explain the what and why of LENA Grow to a funder, this can be a good contextual page to lead with.
Impact Report Inclusion Rules
LENA applies criteria for minimum number of days, maximum days to consider, and maximum time spans and gaps to help ensure both that the data reflect a LENA Grow “dosage” and experience that reasonably adhere to the program's fidelity requirements (found in Appendix A of the Coach Guide), and that the data are reasonably comparable from group to group and child to child.
These rules account for differences you may see in the By the Numbers section when viewing total number served versus the number of groups and children with "enough data to be included."
Evaluation inclusion rules differ slightly for the current 5-week sequences versus the 10-week Legacy version of LENA Grow, as outlined in the tables below.
Group-Level Inclusion Criteria
To be included in outcomes evaluation, a Group must:
| Grow 1 Essentials OR Grow 2 Insights | Legacy |
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Refer to the third page of your Impact Report to see a breakdown of the number of groups that did and did not meet these inclusion criteria.
Evaluation Period
The evaluation period for any included group, and for the included children and recordings within it, starts with the group's LENA Day 1 and ends when the group reaches either the maximum number of LENA Days to consider OR the maximum period, whichever is earlier.
Child-Level Inclusion Criteria
To be included in the evaluation, a Child must:
| Grow 1 Essentials OR Grow 2 Insights | Legacy |
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Refer to the third page of your Impact Report to see a breakdown of the number of children who did and did not meet these inclusion criteria.
Child Segmentation
Children who meet inclusion criteria are further evaluated for classification into segments representing low levels of interactive talk relative to their peers or to national levels.
Child Segment: Bottom Third
When an included child's average hourly turns count on his or her first LENA Day in an included group ranks in the bottom 34% for children in that group on the same day, the child is included in the Bottom Third evaluation.
Important considerations:
- The Bottom Third classification is specific to each child's first LENA Day experience relative to same-group peers on the same day.
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- Bottom Third does not mean the child is in the bottom 1/3 of your entire Impact Report sample.
- Bottom Third does not necessarily mean bottom 1/3 on the group's first LENA Day, because a child's first LENA Day in a group may not be the group's first LENA Day.
Child Segment: Experiencing Low Talk
When an included child's average hourly turns count on his or her first LENA Day in an included group is less than 15, the child is included in the Experiencing Low Talk evaluation.
Pre/Post Measurements Defined
For the Pre turns per hour (TPH) value, we:
- Identify the children who meet criteria for the evaluation at hand (all children, Bottom Third, or Experiencing Low Talk).
- Calculate the average TPH for each child's first LENA Day in any included group.
- Exception: For Legacy groups, we also separately calculate TPH for the child's second LENA Day, as long as it is also the group's second LENA Day. Then we average the child's Day 1 and Day 2 values.
- Average the TPH values for all relevant children.
For the Post turns per hour (TPH) value, we:
- Identify the children who meet criteria for the evaluation at hand (All Children, Bottom Third, or Experiencing Low Talk).
- Calculate the average TPH for each child's last LENA Day in any included group. If the child's next-to-last LENA Day within the evaluation period occurred within 2 weeks of the last day, then we also calculate the average TPH for that day, and average the two days.
- Average the TPH values for all relevant children.