Jessica Heppen, a nationally recognized expert in education research, policy, and practice, is the president & CEO of AIR. Dr. Heppen been with AIR for 20 years and, in that time, has held several key roles during her tenure.
In this commentary, Pooja Reddy Nakamura, an AIR senior researcher explores the question of when to introduce English to children in multilingual contexts. Rather than introducing it at the first opportunity, she suggests grouping classes by local language achievement skill—not just age—and introducing written English only after the local language ...
Battle Creek Public Schools engaged AIR in fall 2017 to conduct an evaluation of a district transformation process, which began with a grant from the W. K. Kellogg foundation. AIR is sharing some findings from the transformation process, the first half of which was pre-pandemic, and the second half ...
Engaging people as partners in their care and decision making can increase the likelihood that they will follow through on actions critical to attaining positive health outcomes. AIR conducted site visits to several accountable care organizations and primary care settings around the country to observe provider strategies to increase patient ...
To respond to Mozambique’s challenges with literacy teaching and learning, the U.S. Agency for International Development funded a five-year program, Vamos Ler! (Let’s Read!). The program’s goal was to strengthen the Mozambican government’s ability to ensure that Grades 1 to 3 students in Nampula and Zambézia provinces can achieve grade-level ...
Katie Rich is a senior researcher at AIR. She leads and supports a variety of projects related to mathematics and computer science education. She is currently serving as a coaching and technical assistance lead for the Engagement and Achievement through Computational Thinking (ENACT) partnership within the Regional Educational Laboratory Midwest, ...
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are bringing about a paradigm shift in what it means to be a reader, and in how education systems must be restructured to support children’s acquisition of comprehension and critical reading skills. AIR is providing the Ministry of Education in each country with a set of measurable, ...
Under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, CMS awarded 20 states planning grants to increase their capacity to provide community-based mobile crisis intervention services for Medicaid individuals. Building on work that started as part of the ARP National Evaluation, AIR summarized awardee state use of planning grants through a ...
The First 5 LA Family Literacy Initiative, which began in 2002, is a comprehensive program to promote language and literacy development for children and their parents, and to promote parenting knowledge and skills, with a goal of greater economic self-sufficiency among low-income families in Los Angeles County. ...
Developing strong literacy skills early on sets the foundation for all future learning. Students entering primary school in developing countries often struggle when learning to read for various reasons: formal education systems lack resources, teachers are not well prepared, classes are overflowing, children enter school with very little exposure to ...