Arya Ansari
· Associate ProfessorVerifiedOhio State University · Nutrition
Active 1997–2026
About
Arya Ansari is an associate professor of Human Development and Family Science in the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University. He is also a faculty associate at the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy. His research program investigates how contextual factors influence the early development of low-income and minority children, with the aim of intervening and informing policies that can minimize the opportunity gap in the United States. His work focuses on the role of publicly funded preschool programs in shaping children’s short- and long-term school success, exploring mechanisms of program benefits and how they prepare children for school. Additionally, Ansari studies how the home environment promotes early educational success, both independently and in conjunction with the school system, and how early education and two-generation programs can facilitate interactions between home and school. His research emphasizes understanding classroom composition, practices, and the impacts of policy interventions on early childhood development and educational outcomes.
Research topics
- Psychology
- Developmental psychology
- Clinical psychology
- Social psychology
Selected publications
Pre-kindergarten classroom experiences and child outcomes through first grade
Early Childhood Research Quarterly · 2026-01-01
articleAssociations of distal elementary school characteristics with prekindergarten student
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology · 2026-01-29
articleEarly Education and Development · 2026-02-25
articleInnovative Qualitative Collection Methods for Centering Race and Ethnicity
Teachers College Record The Voice of Scholarship in Education · 2026-03-01
articleRace, equity, and justice remain challenging yet critical topics for education researchers in the contemporary U.S. context. Meaningful engagement with these topics requires researchers to critically acknowledge dominant paradigms and intentionally design research approaches that meaningfully center race and ethnicity. This research note offers innovative and tested methods for qualitative data collection that enable researchers to engage in deeper dialogues on race and ethnicity with participant-collaborators: (1) purposeful sampling to reflect racial/ethnic diversity within the group under investigation, (2) “matched” and “mixed” focus groups to center participants’ social identities, and (3) vignettes with auditory and visual depictions to facilitate discussion. Each proved beneficial for in-depth and rich data collection, fostering deeper analyses, discussions, and recommendations for practice.
Early Childhood Research Quarterly · 2025-11-15
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingThe Elementary School Journal · 2025-01-31
articleThe study examines students’ skills at kindergarten entry and gains in skills across the kindergarten through first-grade period (pre-COVID-19) for predicting literacy, language, math, inhibitory control, and social-adjustment outcomes in the spring of fourth grade, after schools reopened. In a large US school district, longitudinal data were collected on students (N = 785) who were linguistically diverse (85% home language other than English) and from families with low-income backgrounds. Adjusting for covariates, students’ achievement and executive function skills at entry to kindergarten and gains in these skills across K–1 predicted their proficiency in reading, math, and language in fourth grade. Executive function skills at kindergarten entry and across K–1 predicted inhibitory control in fourth grade, and kindergarten-entry social adjustment predicted school engagement and connectedness to teachers in fourth grade. Early skills or gains were not differentially predictive of fourth-grade outcomes for English-language learners versus English speakers.
Does Teacher and Peer Racial/Ethnic Match Play a Role in Preschool Absenteeism?
Early Education and Development · 2025-01-05
articleChildren and Youth Services Review · 2025-05-29 · 1 citations
articleEarly Childhood Research Quarterly · 2025-01-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingDo Teachers With Absent Students Feel Less Job Satisfaction?
Educational Researcher · 2024-11-11 · 4 citations
articleOpen accessResearch and policy have focused predominantly on the individual consequences for students who miss school. Yet absenteeism does not occur in a vacuum, and less work has focused on how student absenteeism correlates to classroom dynamics. Practically no attention has been paid toward teachers. We propose in this study that student absences make it challenging for teachers to enjoy the very function of their jobs and thus experience more dissatisfaction at work as a result. We find that teachers have lower job satisfaction when more of their students are absent. However, we find statistically significant differences only for broad aspects of teacher satisfaction—job enjoyment, usefulness, and belief in the profession—rather than differences among other related measures of teaching.
Frequent coauthors
- 39 shared
Robert C. Pianta
University of Virginia
- 36 shared
Kelly M. Purtell
The Ohio State University
- 20 shared
Jessica Vick Whittaker
University of Virginia
- 19 shared
Virginia E. Vitiello
University of Virginia
- 16 shared
Erik Ruzek
Northwest Evaluation Association
- 14 shared
Robert Crosnoe
- 13 shared
Ni Yan
Children's Hospital of Zhejiang University
- 13 shared
Michael A. Gottfried
California University of Pennsylvania
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