Paola Guerrero-Rosada receives a Student and Early Career Council Dissertation Research Funding Award

Paola Guerrero-Rosada, a PhD candidate in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology, is one of nine recipients recognized by the Research in Child Development (SRCD) Early Career Council with a Dissertation Research Funding Award. Established in 2008, the Dissertation Research Funding Awards grant $2,000 to use for research costs related to a proposed dissertation project. Guerrero-Rosada’s dissertation is “Identifying Actionable Classroom and Program Features for Scaling High-Quality Prekindergarten.”

Guerrero-Rosada works with Dr. Christina Weiland in the Equity in Early Learning (EEL) Lab and collaborates with a long-standing Research Practice Partnerships between Boston Public Schools, the University of Michigan, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and MDRC. Paola’s research focuses on the classroom and center features that better support children’s development and mechanisms to increase equitable access to high-quality early education settings. For her dissertation, she is leveraging observational, geo-spatial, and administrative data to (1) compare the descriptive and predictive properties of two observational measures of time-use in prekindergarten classrooms, (2) examine whether exposure to challenging instructional content from prekindergarten to first-grade predicts children’s academic gains, and (3) describe statistical and geo-spatial differences between centers that self-select to participate in the Boston Universal Prekindergarten (UPK) program and other centers in the Boston area, focusing on characteristics associated with centers’ engagement with the Boston UPK quality improvement supports. Paola’s goal is to partner with practitioners to generate and disseminate evidence with immediate applications for quality improvement and prekindergarten expansion processes, emphasizing the policies and programs that benefit children’s equitable access to high-quality early education.