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Doctoral candidate Qing Zhang receives AERA-NSF Grants Program Dissertation Award

1/7/2021

 
​The American Educational Research Association (AERA) awarded doctoral candidate Qing Zhang (pictured right) a 2021 AERA-NSF Grants Program Dissertation Award for her proposed dissertation research, "Addressing challenges to the scale-up of effective early childhood programs in the changing landscape of early childhood education.”
 
Zhang will receive $25,000 in support of her research, participate in the two-day research conference held in Washington, D.C., present a poster detailing research at the AERA Annual meeting in spring 2021, and participate in a capstone conference following the annual meeting.
 
Zhang’s dissertation consists of three interconnected studies that address three timely issues regarding the implementation of effective early childhood education (ECE) programs at scale. Specifically, Zhang 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 outcomes. 
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​“My research is intended to have broad policy implications regarding the unintended consequences and benefits of pre-k policies, the potential of utilizing market forces to improve school quality, and the ‘active ingredients’ in later schooling environments that serve to sustain early learning gains,” Zhang said. “Methodologically, my dissertation contributes to the advancement of casually driven research in the field of ECE by using multiple large-scale longitudinal datasets and experimental and quasi-experimental designs.”
 
The AERA-NSF Grants Program supports highly competitive dissertation research that employs rigorous quantitative methods to examine large-scale, education-related data and advance fundamental knowledge of relevance to STEM policy.
 
Zhang is specializing in Educational Policy and Social Context (EPSC) for her doctoral work. Her research interests include early childhood education, education policy, and program evaluation. She holds a Master of Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis and a Bachelor of Social Work from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. Prior to her enrollment in the doctoral program, she worked as an early childhood home visitor serving disadvantaged immigrant children and families in Chicago.
 
Distinguished Professor George Farkas and Assistant Professor Jade Jenkins serve as Zhang’s co-advisors.
 
“Qing’s dissertation proposal is nothing short of outstanding, examining important, substantively interesting issues in early childhood policy implementation and scale-up,” Jenkins said. 

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