Date of Award
1989
Document Type
Practicum
Degree Name
Doctor of Education
Department
Center for the Advancement of Education
Advisor
Dr. W. Allen Scheaf
Committee Member
Georgianna Lowen
Keywords
attendance records, attorneys, baby sweaters, birth weights, blood pressures, cash donations, charitable organizations, church groups, conferences, donation from businesses and individuals, door prizes, education and support sessions, four-hour evaluations, full-term births, labor and delivery complications, labor and delivery units, logs, low socioeconomic participants, medical assistants, neonatology units, newsletters, nurses, nutrition written assessment, nutritionists, OBGYN doctors, pregnancy studies, prenatal vitamins, pre-term births, record of babies, set contributions, sororities, speech translator, teachers, telephone calls, tour of facility units, transportation, weights, written notices, written summary of sessions
Abstract
The problem addressed was that many women became pregnant in the Head Start program for the second, third, or more times and had received no or inadequate parental care. Many lacked the understanding of what constituted healthy conscience and quality prenatal care. Some of the low-expected women failed to see the relationship between adequate parental care and pregnancy outcomes.
The PES program operated for one and a half hours bi-monthly for eight months. A series of 15 sessions was conducted by medical professionals and educators to the benefits for the women and their unborn infants or use as incentives, along with a cash donation of $20 given to each woman after delivery if she had attended a minimum of one session per month. At each session, the women's blood pressure and weight were taken, medical and social forms were made as the needs arose.
At the conclusion of this report, 19 of the 28 babies were born weighing at least 5.5 pounds. One infant was born pre-term because the mother experienced medical complications beyond her medical insurance. The infants' mean weight equals 6.9 pounds, standard deviation equals 1.68 pounds, and t-value equals 3.76. These results indicate that babies born to low-income women who are involved in an on-going prenatal program designed to provide educational support of pregnancy can usually give birth to babies statistically above the norm of 5.5 pounds.