Amy Feygin

Amy Feygin is a principal researcher at AIR, where where she works with state education agencies and local education agencies on research, evaluation, and technical assistance projects. She is an expert in college and career readiness, particularly for underserved youth. She serves as Research Liaison to the Regional Education Laboratory (REL) Midwest Career Readiness Research Alliance, a collaborative research alliance between researchers at AIR and stakeholders in Minnesota that aims to improve career readiness for Minnesota public high school students, with a focus on narrowing opportunity gaps for students from rural areas, American Indian students, and students with disabilities. In addition, with funding from the Institute of Education Science, she is conducting a systematic review of strategies used by community colleges to improve completion rates. In the past, she served as the lead analyst for a randomized controlled trial (RCT) that assessed the impact of a college and career readiness program on students’ college readiness outcomes and as the lead survey analyst for a large-scale RCT that assessed the impact of an alternative to remedial education on community college students’ college outcomes. 

Dr. Feygin is skilled in a range of data collection and analysis methods. She has worked with large-scale state and district administrative datasets, as well as collected and analyzed qualitative data from focus groups and interviews. In addition, she is an expert in applying improvement science methods, including Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles, to complex problems of practice facing schools, districts, and states. She has presented on the promise of one approach to continuous improvement—networked improvement communities—at several practitioner conferences and through webinars. Currently, she is conducting an evaluation of the Iowa Learning and Technology Networked Improvement Community, which aims to improve technology integration in rural Iowa schools.

Previously, Dr. Feygin was a program officer at the Spencer Foundation, where she established a funding program to support the development of research–practice partnerships. Dr. Feygin holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has extensive training in quantitative research methods through an Institutes of Education Sciences predoctoral fellowship. Before joining AIR, her research focused on Chicago Public Schools graduates’ experiences during the transition from high school to postsecondary education.