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 | Leslie Nabors Oláh
Research Assistant Professor
Senior Researcher, Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE)
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Education
1992: B.S.F.S. (Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service), Georgetown University, Certificate in Russian Area Studies Program
1996: M.S.Ed. Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, University of Pennsylvania
1999: Ed.M., Methodology in Developmental Research, Harvard University
2004: Ed.D., Human Development and Psychology, Harvard University
Areas of Expertise
Formative Assessment
Statistical growth modeling
Early childhood cognitive development
Bilingual education
Professional Biography
Dr. Nabors Oláh joined the
Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) in 2005 and is
currently co-Principal Investigator of an NSF-funded exploratory
investigation of teachers’ use of interim assessments in elementary
mathematics. Before beginning her research career, she taught English
as a Second/Foreign Language at the University of California, Berkeley;
the University of Pennsylvania; and the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE)
in Budapest, Hungary. Her interest in the cognitive processes
underlying the acquisition of various languages led her to conduct her
dissertation study on native speakers’ learning of Hungarian from the
ages of 9-30 months. For this work, Dr. Nabors Oláh adapted the
MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI – Words and
Sentences) to measure vocabulary and syntactic growth in Hungarian.
After receiving her doctorate, she conducted NIH-funded post doctoral
work at the University of Delaware. This study investigated the
development of mathematical knowledge from kindergarten through first
grade and its relationship to reading development as well as to other
socio-demographic factors.
Dr. Nabors Oláh has over a decade of experience editing scholarly work that began when she was Editor-in-Chief of Working Papers in Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania from 1994 to 1996. From 1998 to 1999 she served on the editorial board of the Harvard Educational Review, acting as its co-Chair from 1999 to 2000. She currently reviews manuscripts for the American Educational Research Journal (AERJ), Child Development, and Early Education and Development.
She is the author of articles on child development, the co-editor of a
volume on language and literacy, and has presented research findings at
both national and international conferences.
Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Nabors
Oláh’s research on teachers and schools focuses on the ways in which
teachers use assessment results to modify their classroom instruction
and the supports and constraints that affect use of these results. In
order to better capture teachers’ practices, she and her colleagues
have developed a set of instruments to capture teacher analysis,
planning, and action in response to assessment results. Dr. Nabors Oláh
is currently developing an instrument to measure classroom formative
assessment practice on a large scale.
Her current research on children and families centers around English
Language Learners (ELLs) and their (somewhat) simultaneous acquisition
of three codes: their native language, English, and mathematics. She is
currently analyzing ECLS-K data to test two popular hypotheses: the
“bilingual advantage” and the “dual track theory”. In order to test
these theories, Dr. Nabors Oláh uses both conventional growth curve
modeling as well as growth mixture modeling to examine the role of
individual and familial characteristics on the mathematics learning of
ELLs and to test for the existence of multiple sub-populations within
the ELL community.
Classes Taught
EDUC 667 Introductory Statistics for Educational Research
EDUC 801.201 Refining the Research Question
Selected Publications
Jordan, N., Kaplan, D., Oláh, L.N.,
& Locuniak, M. (2006) Number sense growth in kindergarten: A
longitudinal investigation of children at risk for mathematics
difficulties. Child Development, 77, 153-175.
Beck, S. W. & Oláh, L. N. (Eds.) (2001). Perspectives on Language and Literacy: Beyond the Here and Now. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review.
Oláh, L. N. (2000). Editor’s Review of How Language Comes to Children: From Birth to Two Years by Bénédicte de Boysson-Bardies and How Children Learn the Meanings of Words by Paul Bloom. Harvard Educational Review, 70, pp. 538-543.
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