Professional Biography
Dr. Sharon Wolf is an applied developmental psychologist who studies how children's family and educational environments shape their development, focusing on disadvantaged populations in the United States and in low-income countries. Dr. Wolf's research informs interventions and tests the effectiveness of theoretically informed policy solutions designed to promote childhood development and learning through randomized field experiments.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn GSE, Dr. Wolf was a postdoctoral research scientist at the Global TIES for Children research center at New York University and a National Poverty Fellow with the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was in residence at the US Department of Health and Human Services. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Psychology with a concentration in Quantitative Analysis from New York University.
Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Wolf’s work focuses on three primary areas: developing and evaluating interventions to improve educational quality and child learning outcomes; the measurement of educational settings and children’s learning outcomes; and understanding the links between poverty, education, and child development.
Dr. Wolf has worked with Ministry of Education in Ghana to improve the quality of their universal kindergarten education system by helping teachers implement child-centered, play-based learning teaching practices. In partnership with Innovations for Poverty Action and academic collaborators at Penn and NYU, she developed and evaluated a scalable model for in-service teacher training and a parental awareness program delivered through school parent-teacher associations, and evaluated a pre-service training model for kindergarten student teachers.
In addition, Dr. Wolf studies the links between poverty, anti-poverty policies, and child development in both the United States and in low-income countries. She studies the interplay between household economic hardship and school quality in shaping children’s development. In Cote d’Ivoire, Dr. Wolf and her collaborators are beginning a new community-randomized trial to evaluate the impacts of a two-pronged approach to addressing child labor and learning outcomes: poverty reduction through unconditional cash transfers and educational quality improvement through Teaching at the Right Level.
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Journal Editorial Boards
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology
Editorial Board