Katie Dahlke

Principal Researcher

Katie Dahlke is a principal researcher at AIR with 15 years of experience as a program evaluator and researcher, with a focus studying early care and education (ECE) settings and evaluating PreK-12 education programs. Her technical areas of expertise includes quasi-experimental, experimental, and mixed methods research and evaluation design as well as measure development and validation. Dr. Dahlke currently serves as the research lead for the Southwest Early Childhood (SWECE) Research Partnership within the Regional Education Laboratory, Southwest. As part of the SWECE Research Partnership, she serves as a co-principal investigator for a descriptive study examining public preK participation in Oklahoma.

Dr. Dahlke has conducted validation studies of kindergarten entry assessments in Pennsylvania and New Mexico. She has conducted an experimental design study of the impacts of providing preschools teachers with individualized instructional feedback on teacher, program, and child outcomes. She also has led a validation study of early educator practices and supports in Massachusetts, a randomized control trail study of a literacy intervention in Wisconsin, a mixed-method evaluation of an early childhood initiative in Texas, two Early Reading First program mixed-methods evaluations, and a statewide landscape study of language and literacy practices in three ECE programs in Ohio.

Image of Katie Dahlke
Expertise
Education
Reading and Literacy
Human Services
Early Childhood and Child Development

Ph.D. and M.A., Northwestern University, Human Development and Social Policy; M.S.W., University of South Carolina; B.S., Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

 

Contact Katie Dahlke

+1.630.649.6500
Related Work

Children’s Knowledge and Skills at Kindergarten Entry in Illinois

30 Oct 2019
At least half of states administer or are developing kindergarten entry assessments. In fall 2017 the Illinois State Board of Education began requiring teachers to report data on every child’s skills at kindergarten entry using the Kindergarten Individual Development Survey.
Excited kindergarten children

Transition to Full-Day Kindergarten in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

Using extant data provided by the Pennsylvania Department of Education, AIR employed a comparative interrupted time series design to examine the impact of full-day kindergarten on student behavior and attendance in kindergarten as well as on their later reading and mathematics achievement in Grade 3. ...

Scientific Evidence for the Validity of the New Mexico Kindergarten Observation Tool

30 Dec 2017
The New Mexico Public Education Department developed the Kindergarten Observation Tool (KOT) as a multidimensional observational measure of students’ knowledge and skills at kindergarten entry. This study examined the construct validity of the KOT to determine whether data from a field test supported using the KOT to measure six school ...