Harvard Children's Initiative Announces New Fellows

September 16, 1999

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The Harvard Children’s Initiative has selected two new fellows for its Postdoctoral Fellowships in Evaluating Programs for Children. The two-year fellowship program, directed by Professor Carol H. Weiss of the Graduate School of Education, explores new techniques of evaluation to provide better assessments of children’s social and educational programs. The fellowships are supported by the Spencer Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation. The two incoming fellows, Susan Douglas Kelley and Jay Silverman, arrived on Sept. 1 and join six second-year fellows.

Susan Douglas Kelley graduated in August from Vanderbilt University with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and a minor in children’s mental health services. For her dissertation, she used qualitative and quantitative methods to create an ecological/developmental model of factors that affect children’s adaptation or maladaptation to traumatic events. This summer Kelley completed her clinical internship in psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. She is interested in the development and evaluation of preventive or early-intervention programs to address the needs of youth and families coping with stressful experiences. During the fellowship, Kelley hopes to explore the implications of a resiliency-based model for children at risk for community violence, and to evaluate the relevance of such programs to community, practitioner, and theoretical standards.

Jay Silverman graduated in December 1998 from the University of Georgia with a Ph.D. in developmental psychology. His dissertation was an outcome evaluation of a school-based program for the primary prevention of dating violence among adolescents. Silverman is co-investigator and director of a Centers for Disease Control-funded project, the Woman Abuse Tracking in Clinics and Hospitals (WATCH) Project, at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Direct service experience working with adolescents and younger children has played a critical role in Silverman’s conception of the development of problem behavior and of intervention programs. His research interests are the prevention of male violent and abusive behavior within intimate relationships, and the effects of exposure to adult intimate partner violence on children’s emotional and physical health. He proposes to evaluate psycho-educational interventions for male adolescent batterers.

Four fellows from the first cohort completed the fellowship program this summer. Tim Hacsi is writing a book to be published by Harvard University Press on the relationship between educational policy and evaluation evidence since the 1960s, focusing on Head Start, school funding, bilingual education, class size, and social promotion. Tracy Huebner worked with an evaluation team examining the standards-based school reform effort in the Boston public schools. She also helped study the role of evaluation in promoting teachers’ reflective practice. Anthony Petrosino helped plan the proposed "Campbell Collaboration," an international effort that will prepare, maintain, and make accessible the results of systematic reviews of the effects of social intervention. Sean Reardon worked on methods for assessing the effect of neighborhood characteristics on adolescent development and behavior, with an eye toward developing better methods of evaluating community-based programs.

"We are very pleased with the progress of the fellowship program," said Professor Weiss. "It has been both exciting and rewarding to witness the growth of these young scholars. They come from different disciplines and their collaborative work has provided encouraging perspectives on evaluation. We hope that their contributions will yield a better understanding of ways to approach the evaluation of children's programs."

The second cohort of fellows begin their second year this fall. Kathy Boudett studied qualitative methods and applied them in an investigation of Cambridge public schools during 1998-99. This year, she will use both quantitative and qualitative methods to study the effects of MCAS test scores on day-to-day operations in schools. Ana Cristina Terra de Souza will continue her evaluation of a community-based nutritional assistance program for at-risk infants, children, and pregnant women. She is also conducting a case study of an evaluation of a community health workers’ program in Ceará, northeast Brazil.

Eliot Levine is evaluating an innovative public high school in Rhode Island that promotes student development through intensive internships and highly personalized learning. Levine is also writing a book that will incorporate the evaluation findings into a broader discussion of contemporary education reform and the replicability and sustainability of the site’s whole-school reform model. Pamela Perry has designed and carried out an ethnographic evaluation of an anti-bias peer training program in a Boston high school. She is particularly interested in exploring innovative ways to involve youth as evaluation research collaborators, and will spend her second year writing papers on that theme.

Ana Yolanda Ramos-Zayas will continue to develop a model to combine ethnography and theory-based evaluation; in particular, she will concentrate on an ethnography of a Latino community in Boston’s South End. Stuart Yeh has written two papers: the first proposes a new approach for improving the usefulness of evaluation findings and the second suggests ways to foster continuous program innovation and improvement.

The Harvard Children’s Initiative is one of nine interfaculty programs stewarded by the provost or one of the Faculties.