Jennifer Esswein

(she, her, hers)

Director, Applied Research & Equitable Evaluation

Jennifer’s favorite part of her work is collaborating to make data and analysis accessible to people with all levels of comfort with data. She enjoys the process of listening to each partner, understanding their comfort level and context, and coming up with a plan to meet them where they are. This is rooted in her own experience: when she began her graduate work, she didn’t know the first thing about the data and analysis. She remains grateful to the professors who supported her as a lifelong learner. She extends this gratitude to her clients and colleagues who help her learn new things every day.

For more than 10 years, Jennifer taught physics to teachers, making concepts accessible regardless of her students’ science background. Instead of focusing on content alone, Jennifer worked to increase her students’ ability to approach novel problems on their own. She became interested in research on teaching approaches and whether they supported content mastery as well as difficult-to-measure outcomes like reasoning ability.

After completing her doctorate, Jennifer served as a Harvard Strategic Data Project Fellow with the Tennessee Department of Education, where she oversaw accountability ratings and supported research and data use.

Education

• Ph.D., Quantitative Research, Evaluation, and Measurement in Education, The Ohio State University

At family get togethers, you can find me...

Right in the mix of things-talking and hanging out with everyone

My dog thinks I...

Am a little bit too scheduled

When I was ten I wanted to be....

A teacher