Professional Biography
Brooks Bowden is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Bowden serves as the Director of the Center for Benefit–Cost Studies of Education and Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Predoctoral Training Program in Interdisciplinary Methods for Field-based Research in Education. She is an Editor of AERA’s flagship policy journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.
Professor Bowden’s work is motivated by the goal to improve children’s trajectories by minimizing barriers to learning and engagement in school related to poverty and vulnerability. Her research falls into three domains: 1) methodological improvements in economic evaluation, 2) supplemental support for early literacy, and 3) policy partnership research of student support. Across these domains, her work intends to address current and persistent issues by providing rigorous and actionable evidence to inform policy and practice.
Professor Bowden is an expert in program and policy evaluation that incorporate economic analyses. She is a co-author of the primary text on cost-effectiveness, Economic Evaluation in Education: Cost-Effectiveness and Benefit–Cost Analysis (3rd edition). Her work has recently been published in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, Education Researcher, AERA Open, and Prevention Science.
Professor Bowden received early career awards from the Teachers College Alumni Association, the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, and the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. She was recently awarded research funding by the State of North Carolina, the Institute for Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education, Penn Global, and the Neubauer Foundation.
Research Interests and Current Projects
Professor Bowden’s research aims to mitigate the challenges related to poverty that prevent students from experiencing the full value of schooling. Her applied evaluation research focuses on supporting student learning by leveraging external partnerships with families, communities, and other service agencies in order to enrich the resources provided to students.
Recently, Professor Bowden led an economic evaluation of the costs and economic benefits of a comprehensive student support program, City Connects. The reports from this evaluation can be found at the Center for Benefit–Cost Studies of Education. Currently, she is examining school-based approaches to mitigate student hunger, a kindergarten literacy program that leverages home reading and creates efficiencies for teachers, a disciplinary reform focused on improving practices among school police and teachers, and state-level investments in digital learning.
Professor Bowden’s methodological work focuses on simplifying the design and integration of research on costs into randomized field trials. Her goal is to improve the quality and comprehensiveness of evaluations by considering the resources (“ingredients”) that result in treatment contrast and impacts — positive, null, negative, and heterogeneous.
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