About

A. Brooks Bowden is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also serves as the Director of the Center for Benefit–Cost Studies of Education and the Director of the university’s Predoctoral Training Program in Interdisciplinary Methods for Field-based Research in Education. Her work is motivated by the goal to improve children’s trajectories by minimizing barriers to learning and engagement in school related to poverty and vulnerability. Her research spans three domains: methodological improvements in economic evaluation, supplemental support for early literacy, and policy partnership research of student support. She is an expert in program and policy evaluation that incorporate economic analyses and is a co-author of the primary text on cost-effectiveness, 'Economic Evaluation in Education: Cost-Effectiveness and Benefit–Cost Analysis.' Her research aims to support student learning by leveraging external partnerships with families, communities, and service agencies to enrich resources for students. She has led evaluations of comprehensive student support programs, such as City Connects, and is currently examining school-based approaches to mitigate student hunger, literacy programs, disciplinary reforms, and investments in digital learning. Her methodological work focuses on simplifying the design and integration of research on costs into randomized field trials to improve the quality and comprehensiveness of evaluations, considering the resources that produce treatment impacts.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Economics
• Psychology
• Mathematics
• Management science
• Statistics
• Environmental economics
• Medicine
• Engineering
• Public relations
• Nursing
• Social psychology
• Pedagogy
• Mathematics education
• Economic growth
• Public economics
• Medical education
• Econometrics
• Operations management
• Actuarial science

Selected publications

• Factors influencing teachers' sustained implementation of a kindergarten curriculum within the United States: A qualitative analysis

  The Curriculum Journal · 2024-03-12 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Teachers play a critical role in deciding what curricula are used in their classrooms. We examine the factors that teachers describe as influencing their sustainment or discontinuation of a literacy curriculum, Zoology One , following their participation in a randomised controlled trial (RCT) examining the curriculum's efficacy. This study was conducted in a large urban district in the United States and the curriculum was implemented in kindergarten classrooms with children who are typically 5 and 6 years old. One year after their participation in the RCT, teachers who had been randomised to implement Zoology One during the efficacy study ( N = 19) participated in interviews about their ongoing use of the curriculum. We analysed the interview data using a staged coding approach to understand the factors that teachers described influencing their sustainment or discontinuation of the curriculum. We used a multilevel framework to organise results across three levels: individual‐level, school‐level and macro‐level. Results indicate that teacher perceptions of the curriculum, including those related to its effectiveness and age‐appropriateness, contributed to sustained use. At the same time, some teachers' perceptions that the curriculum approaches were not sufficient for their students led them to discontinue some curriculum components. The implementation climate at their school, as well as the widespread adoption of a particular phonics programme within the school district, also influenced teachers' sustainment or discontinuation. Taken together, these results highlight the importance of teachers' perceptions of a curriculum as well as the critical role that the school and district context play in curricular sustainment.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Leveraging Home Reading to Strengthen Literacy Development: Applying Principal Stratification to Explore Efficacy Trial Effects

  Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness · 2024-12-02

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Advantages of Monte Carlo Confidence Intervals for Incremental Cost-Effectiveness Ratios: A Comparison of Five Methods

  Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness · 2024-09-19 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Creating a Mobile Method to Nourish Children in the United States With the “Yum- Yum Bus”

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2024-05-28

  book-chapterOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Advancing High School Dropout Predictions Using Machine Learning

  Communications in computer and information science · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Examining State and District Policy and Resource Allocation to Support Digital Learning

  Peabody Journal of Education · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many districts sought digital learning solutions to recover from learning loss, improve equity, and prepare for future interruptions. With this paper, we aim to provide information to policymakers and legislators regarding the value of resources needed to successfully implement comprehensive digital learning programing. We focus on the policies and resource allocation decisions made in North Carolina, one of the first states to launch a statewide digital learning initiative. First, we demonstrate the effects of state policy on school practices, then we turn the focus of the paper to how districts and schools allocated resources to implement digital learning. We apply the ingredients method to examine the costs of digital learning during the 2018–2019 school year. We close with recommendations for future policy and resource allocation.

  PublisherDOI

• Estimating the Cost of School Mental Health Programming to Increase Adoption and Scale-up of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices

  Issues in clinical child psychology · 2023-01-01 · 4 citations

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Editors’ Introduction

  Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis · 2023-10-30

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Designing Field Experiments to Integrate Research on Costs

  AERA Open · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Although experimental evaluations have been labeled the “gold standard” of evidence for policy (U.S. Department of Education, 2003), evaluations without an analysis of costs are not sufficient for policymaking (Monk, 1995; Ross et al., 2007). Funding organizations now require cost-effectiveness data in most evaluations of effects. Yet, there is little guidance on how to integrate research on costs into efficacy or effectiveness evaluations. As a result, research proposals and papers are disjointed in the treatment of costs, implementation, and effects, and studies often miss opportunities to integrate what is learned from the cost component into what is learned about effectiveness. To address this issue, this paper uses common evaluation frameworks to provide guidance for integrating research on costs into the design of field experiments building on the ingredients method (Levin et al., 2018). The goal is to improve study design, resulting in more cohesive, efficient, and higher-quality evaluations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• From the Section Editor: Introduction to the Economic Evaluation Section

  American Journal of Evaluation · 2022-08-22

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Clive Belfield

  9 shared

• Henry M. Levin

  7 shared

• Robert Shand

  7 shared

• Ryan Fink

  Consortium for Policy Research in Education

  3 shared

• Abigail Gray

  University of Pennsylvania

  2 shared

• Rebecca Davis

  Royal Prince Alfred Hospital

  2 shared

• Katarina Suwak

  University of Pennsylvania

  2 shared

• Patrick J. McEwan

  Wellesley College

  2 shared

Labs

• Consequential CollaborationsPI

Awards & honors

• Early Career Award from the Society for Research on Educatio…
• Institute of Education Sciences 2021 fellows (2021)
• Penn Global Research and Engagement Grant (2023)