The forms I used to ask questions and take notes during the preliminary and final interviews are in Appendix B.
I gave each participant a pre- and a post test to gauge their level of skills at the beginning of the research and at the end, because I wanted an indication of what math skills they had in order to plan activities for the groups, and I wanted to be able to detect small changes in skill levels if they occurred. I considered standardized tests for this purpose, but decided to prepare my own tests. The reasons in favour of standardized tests are obvious—they are standardized to national norms; two different forms of the same test will produce results that can be compared with confidence; a wide range of math skills can be tested on the same form; they are easy to mark. Against them are the facts that they are more intimidating than teacher-made tests; the features that make them easy to mark make them harder for students to use; further, I thought that the range of math skills covered by such tests would be wider than most of my participants had, and would leave them with a sense of failure if they were unable to attempt many or most of the questions on the test. Since I did not expect people to jump grade levels after only 33 hours of group participation, I decided that a teacher-made test, similar to the ones often used before and after a unit of instruction, would be more useful to my purposes.
To that end, I developed a pre-test that had 26 questions, including addition, subtraction, simple division, some of which included decimal numbers, a few questions each to test understanding of fractions and per cents, and finally three word problems that gave a situation and a question, and asked what operation would be used to get the answer. The post test was exactly the same as the pre-test in length, format and type of question, but the numbers were different. The full form of each test is in Appendix C.
In each group session there were opportunities for parents to report on what they had done with their kids during the preceding week. Once during the project, about mid-way through, I spent an entire session on a group interview/feedback session, with a secretary present to take notes on what participants said.
The evaluator attempted to contact every participant, whether they had attended sessions regularly or not, and interviewed them by phone, asking them about their participation in the group, reasons for not participating, their evaluation of the activities and the facilitation of the group.