Mary Kay Dugan is a managing technical assistant consultant at AIR. She is passionate about identifying evidence-based promising practices and translating them into policies and effective programs focused on underserved populations including disadvantaged youth and young adults. Dugan has over 30 years of experience helping federal, state, and local governments ...
Kwelin Waller is senior program manager with the AIR Equity Initiative. Waller works to combine research and technical assistance with real-world applications, leading the Equity Initiative's work in the interconnected areas of workforce development, community health and well-being. Additionally, she leads the AIR Scholars and Leaders Award grant competition, an initiative that ...
Cecilia Xuning Zhang is an interdisciplinary researcher with years of mixed-methods research experience and a wide breadth of content knowledge in the areas of Early Childhood Education (ECE) and Technology-Based Learning Supports. She has rich technical expertise in collecting and analyzing extant data to inform enrollment trends and population estimates, leading user ...
The AIR Equity Initiative is addressing systemic inequalities in the U.S. and globally through our focus on four key areas—educational equity, public safety and policing, workforce development, and community health and well-being. Explore our project library.
While best-in-class sectoral programs have successfully raised participants’ long-term earnings, far too few individuals are able to reap the benefits of participating in these programs. The PROMISE Center at AIR is dedicated to learning what may work to help integrate these underserved populations into a vital workforce ecosystem. ...
AIR developed the Principles for Making Health Care Measurement Patient-Centered to offer a vision of measurement that is patient-driven, holistic, transparent, comprehensible and timely, and co-created with patients. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, AIR launched small-scale pilots to demonstrate how to implement the principles in real-world settings. ...
The Plan, Do, Study, Act Process is central to the improvement of instructional routines. Watch one of the Better Math Teaching Network members in real time and in a real classroom setting introduce the Plan, Do, Study, Act, or PDSA, process.
Samuel E DeWitt is a senior researcher at AIR. Previously, he spent 7 years as a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s (UNC Charlotte) Department of Criminal Justice & Criminology. During his time at UNC Charlotte, Dr. DeWitt served as a co-PI for a National Institute ...
The U.S. Army identified the retention of qualified personnel as a key component of its personnel management strategy, and therefore ARI established a research program on Strategies to Enhance Retention. This program, called “STAY,” sought to improve both enlisted and officer retention, with the AIR work focused specifically on improving ...
When afterschool programs have positive relationships with school-day personnel, families, community members, and between and among program staff and students, these programs are more likely to thrive. This brief explores how afterschool practitioners can build strong relationships that benefit all stakeholders and improve program quality. ...