Sarah Peko-Spicer

Sarah Peko-Spicer is a senior researcher in the Educators and Instruction program at AIR. She has extensive expertise in methods related to cluster randomized trials, optimal design of experiments, replication, and meta-analysis. Her primary areas of interest include social emotional learning, civic engagement, and critical research methods. She currently serves as the project director for the AIR Equity Initiative-funded project Do Social and Emotional Learning Programming and Strategies Work for All Students? A Participatory Evidence Synthesis and the co-principal investigator for an NSF-funded program evaluation of a school-based youth participatory action research (YPAR) curriculum.

Dr. Peko-Spicer is a proud co-organizer of the Quant for What? Collective, a space for quantitative researchers to think deeply about how to shift the field of education research away from paradigms that reproduce oppressive power structures to paradigms that support a humanizing and just education future. She is also a co-founder of the Researchers of Color group in the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness.

Prior to AIR, Dr. Peko-Spicer worked as a data analyst for Pittsburgh Public Schools.