Biography
Katherine M. Barghaus is a senior fellow in the Human Development and Quantitative Methods Division and the executive director of the Penn Early Childhood and Family Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE). In her role as a senior fellow at Penn GSE, she uses her leadership skills to advance research, education, and community engagement.
Dr. Barghaus's research focuses on supporting more effective, equitable, and responsive measures, programs, policies, and systems that better support young children and families in historically marginalized communities. She has held several research leadership roles at Penn GSE. After joining the Penn Child Research Center in 2013 as a research associate, she was appointed executive director of the Center in 2017. In 2020, she also served as interim executive director of the Penn Futures Project, a cross-school initiative involving Penn GSE, Penn Nursing, and Penn's School of Social Policy and Practice that focused on supporting Philadelphia's young people and families. In 2023, she was appointed executive director of the newly formed Penn Early Childhood and Family Research Center co-founded by Drs. Vivian Gadsden and John Fantuzzo. This center brings together researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and community partners to engage in a dynamic, collaborative problem-solving process to enhance the wellbeing of young children and their families. Dr. Barghaus is also a collaborator and member of the Research Exchange for the National Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy Network at Penn's School of Social Policy and Practice, co-founded by Drs. Dennis Culhane and John Fantuzzo.
At Penn GSE, Dr. Barghaus teaches core courses in the Statistics, Measurement, Assessment, and Research Technology (SMART) program and the Early Childhood Education and Family Studies (ECEFS) Academic Certificate program. Her teaching includes advanced coursework in measurement and assessment, and she is part of the teaching team for the Early Childhood Education and Families Studies proseminar. Through this work, she helps connect rigorous research methods training with applied early childhood and family studies. She also provides mentoring and research and practice experiences to groups of students in these programs and to a select group of advanced undergraduate students, who serve as research assistants on community-based research projects.
Dr. Barghaus earned her bachelor's degree in economics from the Schreyer Honors College at the Pennsylvania State University with highest distinction and honors. Before beginning her doctoral training, she worked as a research assistant at the National Bureau of Economic Research at Harvard. She earned her Ph.D. in Policy Research, Evaluation, and Measurement from Penn GSE, where she completed doctoral dissertation with distinction, and was a predoctoral fellow with the National Institute of Education Sciences.
Education
- Ph.D. (Policy Research, Evaluation, and Measurement) University of Pennsylvania, 2012
- B.S. (Economics) The Pennsylvania State University, 2005
Areas of Expertise
- Early childhood education
- Measurement and factor analysis
- Children's social and emotional learning
- Building and using integrated data systems for social policy and practice research
- Research–practice–policy partnerships
Links
Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Barghaus's research focuses on supporting young children and families in historically marginalized communities by using research to inform more effective, equitable, and responsive measures, programs, policies, and systems. She brings together partnership-based inquiry, measurement, quantitative and qualitative methods, and social policy analysis to understand these issues and inform action. A key focus of her scholarship is the development and validation of high-quality measures of the strengths, needs, and experiences of young children and their families.
A central throughline of Dr. Barghaus's scholarship is moving from measurement to action. Her work uses rigorous measurement to make the strengths, needs, and experiences of children and families visible; applies that evidence to inform the development and implementation of effective programs and services; leverages integrated data to support better decisions; and brings these forms of evidence together to help advance more responsive, effective, and equitable policies and systems. A consistent theme across her work is the development of long-term research–practice–public partnerships. She builds collaborative research models in which researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and community partners work together to identify questions, develop and use quality measures, interpret evidence, and identify actionable solutions. Through these partnerships, she aims to generate knowledge that is rigorous, practical, timely, and responsive to the priorities of historically marginalized children, families, and communities, as well as the public agencies that serve them.
Dr. Barghaus's current projects put this measurement-to-action approach into practice. Her work includes a long-standing research partnership with PHLpreK, Philadelphia's publicly funded pre-K program. The partnership uses measures and integrated data to develop and test a performance framework grounded in PHLpreK's logic model, with the goal of supporting equitable access, program quality, and continuous improvement. She also co-leads Conquering Kindergarten, a district-wide partnership with the School District of Philadelphia that equips teachers and families with shared, evidence-based measures and tools for understanding and supporting children's development of social and emotional learning skills. In addition, Dr. Barghaus co-leads a multimethod inquiry into racial disproportionality and disparities in the child welfare system. This work examines how multiple perspectives and sources of evidence can be used to deepen understanding of inequities and inform more effective and equitable responses.
Publications
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