Please Join CEHD on November 17 for Colloquium Speaker, Mimi Engel.

Friday, November 17,2023, 10:00 to 11:30 a.m.

207 Willard Hall Education Building

Mimi Engel is an associate professor and program chair of the Research and Evaluation Methodology (REM) program at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education.

Through her research, Engel aims to contribute to our understanding of how policies and programs affect children’s developmental outcomes and opportunities to learn. Her interest in studying how schools and other contexts influence students is informed by her training in human development and social policy and social work. Spanning several areas including 1) P-12 teachers (policies that affect public school teachers and teacher labor markets, particularly in large urban districts), and 2) early childhood education (kindergarten, P-3 alignment, mathematics teaching and learning), and contextual influences on children, the central aim of her research is to provide new information about contexts, policies, programs and administrative factors that have the potential to improve students’ school-related outcomes, particularly among students from marginalized groups.

Engel uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to conduct program evaluations and analyses investigating issues in education policy. She has conducted a number of studies in the Chicago Public Schools and worked at the Consortium on Chicago School Research. She also utilizes large-scale national databases in her research. Her publications include peer-reviewed articles in Educational Researcher, American Educational Research Journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, the Journal of Education Finance and Policy, Developmental Psychology and Educational Administration Quarterly, among others.

Research

Teachers: Engel is currently working with Denver Public Schools through a Research-Practice Partnership(RPP) focused on the district’s teacher workforce and teacher policies with the aim of improving teacher retention and student outcomes. This work is generously funded by a William T Grant Foundation Institutional Challenge Grant, an Institute of Education Sciences(IES) RPP grant, and support from CU Boulder.

Early Childhood Education: Engel is analyzing data and publishing results from a three-year study that involved extensive classroom observations in P-3 classes in New York City. This work is generously funded by the Heising Simons Foundation.