Jessica Logan

Associate Professor, Department of Special Education

Associate Professor of Special Education Jessica Logan is a quantitative methodologist who studies child development, with an emphasis on growth in academic skills from preschool through fourth grade for children at risk for learning disabilities. She has expertise in a broad range of quantitative analytic and methodological techniques, which she applies to understanding individual differences in children’s development. She is particularly interested in adapting new statistical models or research designs for questions about how children’s academic skills grow and change. Her work is, by definition, transdisciplinary, and she champions strong collaborations between researchers in the educational and methodological fields. In her recent work, Dr. Logan has been working to understand the data management and data sharing practices of education-science researchers, and developing trainings and tools to help researchers improve these practices.   

Currently, Dr. Logan serves as a co-investigator for a number of federally funded projects, including one seeking to understand how preschool children’s language skills change during preschool (ProPELL), a project examining the effectiveness of an intervention designed to improve the emergent literacy skills of preschool children (Brightstart), studying teachers’ barriers and facilitators for implementation of a kindergarten and grade 1 curriculum (Developing Talkers), and developing an intervention for preschool math language (Reading and Playing with Math). On these projects, Dr. Logan developed the plans for how to design the research study.