About MDRC
Davis conducts research on programs and policies that seek to foster positive child development, expand access to high-quality education, and mitigate the hardships of poverty for children and families. She specializes in cost methodology, program evaluation, and implementation research. Davis currently works on evaluations of the Get Ready Guilford Initiative and the Personalized Learning Initiative, which explores ways of offering affordable personalized learning to students via large-scale tutoring programs. In addition, she serves as a research associate at the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies in Education, an organization that drives innovation in cost methodology for education applications. A former preschool and K-12 teacher, Davis holds a bachelor’s degree in studio art and a master’s degree in education from the University of New Hampshire. She completed her Ph.D. in education policy from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was an Institute for Education Sciences Predoctoral Fellow in Interdisciplinary Methods for Field-based Research in Education.
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MDRC Publications
Issue FocusA Resource for Organizational Leaders Participating in Research Studies
September, 2023Implementation researchers often conduct interviews or surveys with staff members at programs participating in studies. This new post from MDRC’s Implementation Research Incubator blog offers tips to share with the leaders of these programs for communicating with their own staff about these research activities.
Issue FocusJuly, 2023High-dosage tutoring (HDT) programs are a proven way to accelerate student learning. The Personalized Learning Initiative is studying and supporting the expansion of HDT across the country. This post shares what the team has learned so far plus a planning tool that districts can use to implement such programs.
CommentaryFebruary, 2023In this commentary originally published in The Hechinger Report, Rebecca Davis and Shira Mattera describe how investing in universal early assessment is an important approach to help communities meet the specific needs of young children and their families.
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Other Publications
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Projects
Jean Grossman, Shira Kolnik Mattera, Barbara Condliffe, Dina A. R. Israel, Jedediah J. Teres, Hannah Dalporto, Sonia Drohojowska, Lauren Scarola, Frieda Molina, Rebecca Schwartz, Mei Huang, Rebecca Davis, Julia WalshThe pandemic has led to unfinished learning for a broad swath of students. This unfinished learning has also exacerbated existing disparities in student outcomes by race and ethnicity, income, and geography. Research has shown that high-dosage tutoring is the most effective way for improving learning for many students. But high-dosage tutoring is cost- and resource-...
Shira Kolnik Mattera, Desiree Principe Alderson, Tahsin Amin, Rebecca Davis, Carolyn Hill, Virginia Knox, Emily Kowall, Sydney Roach, Anne Warren, Samantha WulfsohnChildren’s life prospects are substantially shaped by their circumstances between birth and age 3, so the earliest years of life present promising opportunities to disrupt cycles of poverty. Children growing up in families with low incomes acutely experience the disadvantages of poverty, and they disproportionately remain at the bottom of the economic ladder as adults...