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Biography
Dr. Rachel A. Gordon, BS, MPP, PhD, is Associate Dean for Research and Administration and tenured Professor of Health Studies in the College of Health and Human Sciences at Northern Illinois University. Prior to joining NIU, Dr. Gordon spent over two decades at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where she was a tenured Professor of Sociology and served as Chair of Social Science Research and Chair of the Executive Committee in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, was Associate Director for the Social Sciences at the Institute for Health Research and Policy, and, was a tenured Professor, Associate Director, and Senior Scholar at the University of Illinois System’s Institute of Government and Public Affairs where she also Chaired the System-Wide Working Group on Education and Learning. Dr. Gordon additionally spent AY2122 as Director of the Cecil J. Picard Center for Child Development and Lifelong Learning, Loyd Rockhold Endowed Chair in Child Development, and a tenured Professor of Sociology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
In 2018, Dr. Gordon was awarded one of UIC’s top honors, as Distinguished Researcher of the Year for the Social Sciences. For her dissertation work at the University of Chicago, Dr. Gordon received a Frontiers of Research on Children, Youth, and Families Young Scholar Award in 1998 from the Board on Children, Youth, and Families of the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine. As an undergraduate student, Gordon was awarded the Phi Beta Kappa Senior Thesis Research Prize and was the College of Liberal Arts Student Marshal and Valedictorian at Penn State University (main University Park campus). Dr. Gordon’s research has been continuously funded from federal agencies (NIH, NSF, IES) for over a decade.
Drawing on multiple disciplines and methods, Gordon’s research broadly examines contextual, social, and policy factors that nurture and constrain children’s development. She has studied early child care and education, parental employment, multigenerational families, neighborhood dynamics, youth peer groups, and appearance-related identity cues. Her most recent intellectual pursuits aim to advance understanding regarding the cost, quality, adaptability, and ownership of educational products whose creation and use are publicly funded, and, the ways in which snap judgments of appearance shape social constructions, identities, and experiences.
Dr. Gordon’s research encompasses three broad areas:
Early Childhood Education: Dr. Gordon has led or co-led several IES-funded (R305A130118; R305A090065; R305A160010) and NIH-funded (R01HD060711) projects whose collaborative teams built evidence about existing measures and developed new assessments of early childhood classroom quality. A signature of this work has been the application of modern measurement concepts and psychometric tools in ways that balance desires to ensure taxpayer dollars invest in high-quality classrooms with recognitions of variation across raters and days and imprecision of small item sets. Dr. Gordon’s work aims to help the public, practitioners, and policymakers understand and apply cutting-edge tools that can address these concerns in ways that are fair and sustainable, including through transparency regarding evidence and pricing and support of continuous measure improvement. Dr. Gordon has served on local, state, and national advisory groups on these topics, including being a member and featured speaker to the IES Technical Working Group on Quality in Early Childhood Settings.
Healthy Lifespan Development: Dr. Gordon led the psychometric arm of one of the first IES-funded Researcher-Practitioner Partnership grants (R305H130012) that created the Washoe County School District Social-Emotional Competency Assessment (WCSD-SECA). The WCSD-SECA has been adopted by dozens of school districts, state education agencies, and evaluators, and the team has shared its continuous measure improvement approach in scholarly and practice outlets. These efforts support the building and using of local evidence in ways that embrace modern measurement standards including recognition that assessments are not statically valid and reliable but rather evidence builds continually and should be carefully weighed in relation to each potential use. Also supporting this goal was an NIH project (R03HD098310), collaborative with Ariel Aloe (University of Iowa) that demonstrated and disseminated strategies to support researchers and practitioners in linking locally adapted forms. Dr. Gordon’s research on snap-judgments of appearance, funded by NSF (SBE 1921526, with Amelia Branigan) and NIH (R03HD096203, R01HD081022, with Robert Crosnoe), built evidence regarding how adolescents’ and young adults’ social experiences and personal identities are affected by the way others perceive their physical features.
Methodological Advances: Across her substantive research, Dr. Gordon is known for applying leading-edge statistical methods and is passionate about making these methods widely accessible. She is author of two graduate statistics textbooks, Regression Analysis for the Social Sciences and Applied Statistics for the Social and Health Sciences, both published by Routledge. She has written pedagogical articles, including about using item response theory to improve precision and validity when measuring constructs in family science, applying the many-facet Rasch model to improve observational measuring of classroom quality, and using multi-level models to capture trajectories in social program outcomes. Dr. Gordon has supported the dissemination of the co-creation measure development approach developed in collaboration with the Washoe County School District, including through a chapter (with Laura Davidson) on Cross-cutting Issues for Measuring SECs (Social-Emotional Competencies) in Context that crystallizes key features of the approach. Dr. Gordon’s collaboration with Ariel Aloe (University of Iowa), and, Tianxiu Wang and Hai Nguyen (University of Illinois at Chicago), produced a tutorial on using the alignment approach to link behavioral health measures across children’s ages, genders, and race/ethnicities that includes an open-access R package for reading and displaying results.
Dr. Gordon’s bridging of multiple disciplines is reflected in her work being published in a wide breadth of leading academic journals including AERA Open, American Journal of Evaluation, Child Development, Criminology, Demography, Developmental Psychology, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Journal of Educational Policy, Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Adolescent Research, Journal of Research on Adolescence, and Social Psychology Quarterly. Her article on The Child and Adult Care Food Program: Who is Served and Why? (with Robert Kaestner, Sanders Korenman, and Kristin Abner) won the Frank R. Breul Memorial Prize for the best article published in Social Service Review in 2011.
Throughout her career, Dr. Gordon has worked at the intersection of academic research and social policy, including by directing the Illinois Family Impact Seminars for a decade and launching the Illinois chapter of NEW Leadership with the Conference of Women Legislators of the Illinois General Assembly. With Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, Dr. Gordon created the Careers in Child and Family Policy guidebooks and websites that supported developmental scientists pursuing policy training and positions throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
Dr. Gordon’s professional contributions also include being Co-Chair of the 2020 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research on Adolescence and Chair of the Science Policy Subcommittee of the Society for Research in Child Development from 2018-2021. Dr. Gordon's commitment to faculty, staff, and student development and diversity is exemplified by her service as a mentor for SRCD’s Towards 2044: Horowitz Early Career Scholar Program which supports scholars from under-represented ethnic/racial groups from North America in pursuing graduate work in developmental science.
In 2018, Dr. Gordon was awarded one of UIC’s top honors, as Distinguished Researcher of the Year for the Social Sciences. For her dissertation work at the University of Chicago, Dr. Gordon received a Frontiers of Research on Children, Youth, and Families Young Scholar Award in 1998 from the Board on Children, Youth, and Families of the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine. As an undergraduate student, Gordon was awarded the Phi Beta Kappa Senior Thesis Research Prize and was the College of Liberal Arts Student Marshal and Valedictorian at Penn State University (main University Park campus). Dr. Gordon’s research has been continuously funded from federal agencies (NIH, NSF, IES) for over a decade.
Drawing on multiple disciplines and methods, Gordon’s research broadly examines contextual, social, and policy factors that nurture and constrain children’s development. She has studied early child care and education, parental employment, multigenerational families, neighborhood dynamics, youth peer groups, and appearance-related identity cues. Her most recent intellectual pursuits aim to advance understanding regarding the cost, quality, adaptability, and ownership of educational products whose creation and use are publicly funded, and, the ways in which snap judgments of appearance shape social constructions, identities, and experiences.
Dr. Gordon’s research encompasses three broad areas:
Early Childhood Education: Dr. Gordon has led or co-led several IES-funded (R305A130118; R305A090065; R305A160010) and NIH-funded (R01HD060711) projects whose collaborative teams built evidence about existing measures and developed new assessments of early childhood classroom quality. A signature of this work has been the application of modern measurement concepts and psychometric tools in ways that balance desires to ensure taxpayer dollars invest in high-quality classrooms with recognitions of variation across raters and days and imprecision of small item sets. Dr. Gordon’s work aims to help the public, practitioners, and policymakers understand and apply cutting-edge tools that can address these concerns in ways that are fair and sustainable, including through transparency regarding evidence and pricing and support of continuous measure improvement. Dr. Gordon has served on local, state, and national advisory groups on these topics, including being a member and featured speaker to the IES Technical Working Group on Quality in Early Childhood Settings.
Healthy Lifespan Development: Dr. Gordon led the psychometric arm of one of the first IES-funded Researcher-Practitioner Partnership grants (R305H130012) that created the Washoe County School District Social-Emotional Competency Assessment (WCSD-SECA). The WCSD-SECA has been adopted by dozens of school districts, state education agencies, and evaluators, and the team has shared its continuous measure improvement approach in scholarly and practice outlets. These efforts support the building and using of local evidence in ways that embrace modern measurement standards including recognition that assessments are not statically valid and reliable but rather evidence builds continually and should be carefully weighed in relation to each potential use. Also supporting this goal was an NIH project (R03HD098310), collaborative with Ariel Aloe (University of Iowa) that demonstrated and disseminated strategies to support researchers and practitioners in linking locally adapted forms. Dr. Gordon’s research on snap-judgments of appearance, funded by NSF (SBE 1921526, with Amelia Branigan) and NIH (R03HD096203, R01HD081022, with Robert Crosnoe), built evidence regarding how adolescents’ and young adults’ social experiences and personal identities are affected by the way others perceive their physical features.
Methodological Advances: Across her substantive research, Dr. Gordon is known for applying leading-edge statistical methods and is passionate about making these methods widely accessible. She is author of two graduate statistics textbooks, Regression Analysis for the Social Sciences and Applied Statistics for the Social and Health Sciences, both published by Routledge. She has written pedagogical articles, including about using item response theory to improve precision and validity when measuring constructs in family science, applying the many-facet Rasch model to improve observational measuring of classroom quality, and using multi-level models to capture trajectories in social program outcomes. Dr. Gordon has supported the dissemination of the co-creation measure development approach developed in collaboration with the Washoe County School District, including through a chapter (with Laura Davidson) on Cross-cutting Issues for Measuring SECs (Social-Emotional Competencies) in Context that crystallizes key features of the approach. Dr. Gordon’s collaboration with Ariel Aloe (University of Iowa), and, Tianxiu Wang and Hai Nguyen (University of Illinois at Chicago), produced a tutorial on using the alignment approach to link behavioral health measures across children’s ages, genders, and race/ethnicities that includes an open-access R package for reading and displaying results.
Dr. Gordon’s bridging of multiple disciplines is reflected in her work being published in a wide breadth of leading academic journals including AERA Open, American Journal of Evaluation, Child Development, Criminology, Demography, Developmental Psychology, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Journal of Educational Policy, Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Adolescent Research, Journal of Research on Adolescence, and Social Psychology Quarterly. Her article on The Child and Adult Care Food Program: Who is Served and Why? (with Robert Kaestner, Sanders Korenman, and Kristin Abner) won the Frank R. Breul Memorial Prize for the best article published in Social Service Review in 2011.
Throughout her career, Dr. Gordon has worked at the intersection of academic research and social policy, including by directing the Illinois Family Impact Seminars for a decade and launching the Illinois chapter of NEW Leadership with the Conference of Women Legislators of the Illinois General Assembly. With Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, Dr. Gordon created the Careers in Child and Family Policy guidebooks and websites that supported developmental scientists pursuing policy training and positions throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
Dr. Gordon’s professional contributions also include being Co-Chair of the 2020 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research on Adolescence and Chair of the Science Policy Subcommittee of the Society for Research in Child Development from 2018-2021. Dr. Gordon's commitment to faculty, staff, and student development and diversity is exemplified by her service as a mentor for SRCD’s Towards 2044: Horowitz Early Career Scholar Program which supports scholars from under-represented ethnic/racial groups from North America in pursuing graduate work in developmental science.