Jill Walston

Principal Researcher

Jill Walston is a principal researcher at the American Institutes for Research. Dr. Walston leads quantitative research and technical assistance projects mainly for the Midwest and the Southwest Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) programs, sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). Dr. Walston serves as the project director for AIR’s subcontract on the REL Northeast and Islands. Her areas of methodological expertise are quantitative research design and analysis, survey research, questionnaire development, assessment, and qualitative research methods. Broad content experience and expertise includes early childhood education, educator effectiveness and evaluation, competency-based education, and college and career readiness.

Dr. Walston worked for 15 years supporting the National Center for Education Statistic’s early childhood longitudinal studies—primarily the ECLS-K and the ECLS-K:11 and has authored several NCES reports and presentations using the ECLS-K data. She has taught kindergarten and first grade, and has published two articles in peer-reviewed journals about computer-based data collection—one on conducting computer-assisted focus groups and another on web-based questionnaire design.

Jill Walston
Expertise
College and Career Readiness
Teacher Preparation and Performance

M.A. and Ph.D., Measurement, Statistics, and Evaluation, University of Maryland-College Park; B.S. Early Childhood Education, University of Maryland-College Park

Contact Jill Walston

+1.202.403.5000
Related Work

Minnesota Survey Design and Analysis Support

30 Jun 2017
The Minnesota Department of Education administers about 65 surveys a year. These surveys help gauge needs, gather feedback, inform programs and policy, and fulfill legislative requirements. The Midwest Comprehensive Center partnered with the department in 2015 and 2016 to build the agency’s capacity in survey methodology, enhance overall survey quality, ...

Strategies for Estimating Teacher Supply and Demand Using Student and Teacher Data

01 Dec 2016
Every year the U.S. Department of Education reports for each state in the country the grade levels, subject areas, and geographic areas that have experienced teacher shortages. By law the Minnesota Department of Education must conduct a multimethod teacher supply and demand study every two years. This report, a joint ...
Teacher working closely with student

Looking Under the Hood of Competency-Based Education: The Relationship Between Competency-Based Education Practices and Students’ Learning Skills, Behaviors, and Dispositions

29 Jun 2016
Competency-based education makes student mastery of learning goals—rather than seat time—the metric to determine student credit and progression. Take a closer look at how schools implement competency-based education, and how it is related to what students need to learn effectively.

The New First Grade: Kindergarten

17 Dec 2013
According to an AIR analysis of data from U.S. Department of Education’s early childhood longitudinal studies, America’s public school kindergarten has become dramatically more academic. In this blog post, Jill Walston and Kristin Flanagan describe the data and ask how this affects children who don't have the opportunity to attend ...

Expectations and Reports of Homework for Public School Students in the First, Third, and Fifth Grades

01 Dec 2008
This Issue Brief reports that the amount of reading and mathematics homework that students' teachers expected them to complete on a typical evening generally increased from first grade to fifth grade. Children in schools with higher percentages of minority students had teachers who expected more homework on a typical evening ...