
I am a Human Services Researcher in the Children, Youth, and Families Division at Mathematica Policy Research and Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) in the School of Education & Human Development at the University of Virginia.
My research seeks to identify and accurately measure essential features of quality in early care and education classrooms and explores how they can be brought to scale successfully. Specifically, I focus on two features most directly related to young children’s experiences in the classroom: curricular quality and interactional quality. My work integrates developmental theory with the tools of policy analysis to conduct causally-motivated and descriptive studies with the goal of informing policy and practice to better serve children and their families.
Prior to joining Mathematica, I was an Institute of Education Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow with the School of Education & Human Development at the University of Virginia. I received my PhD in Education from the University of California, Irvine in 2018.
Teaching
My teaching practices reflect the idea that students learn best when the course material is relevant, meaningful, and rooted in real-life contexts. Regardless of the career paths they take, students will need the tools to evaluate, communicate, and disseminate evidence to guide informed decision making. I strive to help all of my students achieve success by preparing them to be thoughtful and careful consumers and producers of scientific studies.
I make sure my students are successful in school and in life by providing meaningful opportunities for them to show what they know, emphasizing collaborative inquiry, and tailoring feedback they need to improve. My classes are successful when students come away with an intuition for the strengths and weaknesses of different research designs and analytic plans, and use that information to evaluate and ask informed questions about the validity of scientific studies they will encounter in their personal and professional lives. These skills go beyond application to only the social sciences, and provide students with a sharper toolkit for critically consuming or producing research in any field or capacity.
University of California, Irvine
Teaching assistant and lab instructor for the following courses:
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Education Research Design (undergraduate)
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21st Century Literacies (undergraduate)
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Applied Regression (graduate)