Kristina Cassiday, a doctoral student in the UMD College of Education’s Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, has been chosen for a two-year Strategic Data Fellowship through the Center for Education Policy at Harvard University.
The fellowship is a professional development program with the goal of developing data strategists in school systems, state education departments, and nonprofit organizations. Fellows take part in workshops aimed at honing their skills and knowledge in measurement and analysis, leadership and management, and research in education policy, culminating in a capstone report, which helps to provide education leaders with insight on how to leverage the data they have to inform policy and decision-making.
Through the Strategic Data Fellowship, Cassiday, who is in COE’s Measurement, Statistics, and Evaluation doctoral program, will be working concurrently at Baltimore-based nonprofit Urban Teachers. As the assistant director of research and evaluation at the organization, which aims to prepare highly effective teachers in high-need urban schools, her role will be to help implement performance measures and improve the evaluation system for teachers. She will also provide overall program evaluation so that Urban Teachers’ leaders can understand what parts of the program lead to improving teaching practice and student outcomes.
“I am looking forward to directly using the skills that I have learned in my program, along with my past work experience training teachers and [working] as a teacher myself,” she said.
Cassiday’s current studies in the MSE program focus on practicing sound research design and working with quantitative data. She previously served in the Peace Corps teaching university English courses to students in rural China.
