Carmen Martinez

Carmen Martínez is a researcher with 18 years of experience in a range of national, state, and local research and evaluation projects in the domains of of early education and intervention, programs for at-risk and culturally diverse students, closing the achievement gap for low-income and minority students; and policies and interventions designed to improve underrepresented students’ preparation for, access to, and persistence in the STEM fields. Martínez is skilled in quantitative and qualitative analyses and has extensive expertise in cognitive and usability testing research, as well as critical incident methodology.

Most recently, Martínez served as a research alliance liaison for the New Mexico Achievement Gap Research Alliance consisting of 40 alliance members for the Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest. In this role, she coordinated projects, events, and activities related to the alliances’ research agendas while building relationships with research alliance members and fostering ongoing communication. Other recent roles included serving as senior lead on tasks for the implementation of the Teacher and Leader Evaluation Systems Study, a five-year, randomized controlled trial to test the impact of a model evaluation system to provide feedback to teachers and principals based on classroom observations, principal evaluation, and measures of student growth in eight school districts across the United States. Other recent work has focused on the provision of research and evaluation assistance to projects geared toward the inclusion and retention of underrepresented minorities in the geosciences, aquatic sciences, and STEM fields.