Principal Education Researcher, SRI Education
CJ Park leads research projects that examine how education policies and programs can improve the academic and life outcomes of children and young adults from historically underserved and marginalized communities. She has experience leading large-scale, mixed-methods evaluation projects that integrate implementation and causal impact research, as well as helping practitioners use research to inform practice. Her methodological expertise includes evaluation design, survey development and analysis, qualitative data collection and analysis, and implementation metric design. Park’s recent research focuses on supporting students’ success in high school and beyond and on improving teaching quality.
At SRI, Park’s work in college and career readiness has included evaluating career pathways in high schools, studying programs that help students develop social and emotional skills necessary for academic and career success, and providing technical assistance to educators on postsecondary transitions. For example, Park leads an evaluation of the implementation and impact of the Career Connected Pathways Project, an initiative aimed at increasing Arizona high school students’ access to quality career pathways in cybersecurity and computer science. She has also evaluated an effort to expand and improve career pathways in health care for students in Oakland. Park is currently leading the evaluation of Skills for Secondary School Success, which aims to support middle school students in developing the social and emotional learning skills—such as self-management, goal orientation, and self-efficacy—they need for high school and beyond. Finally, as co-lead of the Improving Postsecondary Transitions Partnership for the Regional Educational Laboratory Appalachia, she provided educators in rural eastern Kentucky with research-based technical assistance on nonacademic strategies to support postsecondary transitions.
In her work in improving teaching quality, Park focuses primarily on studies of the implementation and impact of professional development. She has partnered with the National Writing Project on multiple federally funded evaluations. For example, she leads a study of the scale-up of the National Writing Project’s College, Career, and Community Writers Program, a large-scale, district-level cluster randomized controlled trial examining the effect on teachers and students of professional development on argument writing in rural districts.
Park holds a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown University and an undergraduate degree in economics and sociology from Rutgers University.
Key projects
- National Writing Project’s College, Career, and Community Writers Program
- Evaluation of the Career Connected Pathways Project
- Evaluation of Skills for Secondary Success
- Oakland Health Career Pathways Project
- California’s Linked Learning District Initiative