Katie Dahlke

Katie Dahlke has over 20 years of experience as a program evaluator and researcher, with a focus on studying early care and education (ECE) settings and evaluating PreK-12 education programs. Her technical areas of expertise include quasi-experimental, experimental, and mixed methods research and evaluation design as well as measure development and validation. 

Dr. Dahlke currently serves as the applied research task lead for REL Midwest, director of research and evaluation for the Center for Integrated Prevention, Promotion, Innovation, and Advancement, and principal investigator for an Education Innovation and Research grant with Sesame Workshop and Communities In Schools. 

She has also served as director for an early childhood education REL Southwest partnership in Oklahoma. She has led a number of causal inference evaluations, descriptive studies, and validation studies. These include a mixed-methods quasi-experimental design study of full-day kindergarten in Pennsylvania and an evaluation of Sesame Workshop’s Sesame Strong initiative. She has also led validation studies of kindergarten entry assessments in Pennsylvania and New Mexico, as well as an experimental design study of the impacts of providing preschool teachers with individualized instructional feedback on teacher, program, and child outcomes. 

Her other work includes a descriptive study of early educator practices and supports in Massachusetts, a literacy intervention RCT in Wisconsin, an evaluation of an early childhood initiative in Texas, two Early Reading First program evaluations, and a statewide needs assessment descriptive study of language and literacy practices in three ECE programs in Ohio. She is a certified reviewer for the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Group Design Standards (Version 4.1).