Training Fidelity and Knowledge Gain of Resource Parents: The National Training and Development Center Curriculum

Background and Purpose: Training plays a critical role for resource parents in not only being able to start parenting but also continuing to parent and maintain successful placements for youth in care (Saarnik, 2021). Reviews have noted training as one of the most significant contributors to resource parent engagement and retention (Hanlon et al., 2021; Williams et al., 2023). An important consideration in evaluating training program effectiveness is training fidelity, yet there is relatively little research documenting the relationship between training fidelity and resource parent knowledge. The purpose of this research was to examine the association between training fidelity and resource parent knowledge following participation in the National Training and Development Center (NTDC) training program.

Methods: This was a cross-sectional quantitative study of a sample of 1,037 resource parents who participated in a large, federally-funded evaluation from seven U.S. states. Further details about NTDC and participants will be provided during the presentation (mean age=40.8; primarily White; 61.5% female). Fidelity measures included: activities completed, duration, and duration difference from expected. Knowledge measures included: pretest knowledge score, posttest knowledge score, and change in participants’ knowledge score. Multiple sociodemographic characteristics were also collected. Authors utilized R software to conduct descriptive statistics of participant characteristics and regression analysis to examine the association between training fidelity and knowledge while controlling for multiple sociodemographic characteristics.

Results: Fidelity was significantly associated with knowledge gain among participants in this sample. Age, gender, and sexual orientation of prospective resource parents were found to be related to their acquisition of knowledge after completing the training program. Specifically, older participants demonstrated poorer knowledge gains, and participants who identified as male reported significant knowledge gain at post-test; however, their scores were lower than females at pre-test. Participants who identified their sexual orientation as “other” were less likely than heterosexuals to have an increase in knowledge scores from pretest to posttest, but they reported significantly higher pre-test sores.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings support that fidelity should include adherence to intended content and the intended time frame as a means of promoting knowledge gain from training. General research on adult learning and training has identified that older adults have shown poorer gains in training context, but those who are motivated do better in training regardless of their age (Colquitt et al., 2000). Regarding gender, a meta-analysis of general parenting interventions found multiple individual, family, community, and societal barriers that influence parenting interventions and limit the effectiveness with fathers (Panter-Brick et al., 2014). Given that males achieved similar scores to females at post-test, it is a promising finding that the NTDC training supported significant increase in male resource parents’ knowledge. When considering sexual orientation, better outcomes could be related to strengths that non-heterosexuals must acquire in order to adapt to stress or stigma placed upon them due to their marginalized identity (Zhang et al., 2023). Lastly, it is important to note that there were no differences in knowledge gains among most sociodemographic characteristics, which suggests the potential transfer of training knowledge among diverse resource parents.