Doctoral student Qing Zhang awarded Graduate Dean's Dissertation Fellowship

Fourth-year doctoral student Qing Zhang has been awarded a 2020 Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship. The fellowship provides a $5,000 summer stipend in support of her research addressing challenges in the scaling-up of early childhood education programs. UCI awarded 33 Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Year Fellowships campus-wide.
 
"I'm very excited because this is a recognition of my work," Zhang said. "I'm grateful that UCI is providing this opportunity for me to focus on my research, and I am also grateful to have a very supportive dissertation proposal committee who provided me with valuable feedback on my dissertation."

Zhang, who is advised by Assistant Professor Jade Jenkins and Distinguished Professor George Farkas, is specializing in Educational Policy and Social Context (EPSC). Her research interests include early childhood education, education policy, and program evaluation.

​Fellowship Abstract

​Zhang's dissertation consists of three interconnected studies that address three timely issues regarding the implementation of early childhood education (ECE) programs at scale. She is using  large-scale longitudinal data and causally-driven methods to evaluate the policy, program, and peer environments that jointly shape the development of children during early childhood and beyond. Specifically, she is examining (1) the impact of state pre-kindergarten programs on the ECE delivery system, focusing on its impact on Head Start, (2) the effects of competition in the ECE market on program quality and medium-term student outcomes, and (3) the peer effects of preschool attendance – the effects of having peers who went to preschool in one’s junior high school classroom on student cognitive and noncognitive outcomes.