Ashley Kopack Klein

Ashley Kopack Klein is a senior researcher focusing on early childhood. Her experience includes conducting trainings on observational measures, child assessments, and data use; developing measures and creating professional development tools for early childhood educators; and conducting studies on children and families and the quality of early care and education programs, including Head Start, home-based child care, and center-based care.

Kopack Klein has more than a decade of experience providing leadership on a range of early childhood projects. Kopack Klein is the project director for the Home-Based Child Care Supply and Quality (HBCCSQ) project. She oversees the examination of HBCC supply and quality through secondary analysis and original research. This encompasses (1) a qualitative study of the experiences of family, friend, and neighbor providers and (2) a validation study to gather psychometric evidence for a new toolkit of measures developed for HBCC providers who care for school-age children. Kopack Klein is also the deputy project director for the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES). She has helped oversee FACES, a multifaceted national descriptive study of Head Start programs, classrooms, children, and families, since 2016, including the parallel studies of Region XI American Indian and Alaska Native Head Start programs in tribal communities (AIAN FACES). She also directed projects responding to data users’ questions about the FACES and AIAN FACES studies.

In addition to these studies, Kopack Klein helped develop a child care observation tool, the Quality of Care for Infants and Toddlers (QCIT)—formerly the Quality of Caregiver-Child Interactions for Infants and Toddlers (Q-CCIIT)—to fill a gap in the types of measures that are available and appropriate for evaluating the quality of interactions between nonparental caregivers and infants and toddlers in child care settings. Since the development of the QCIT, Kopack Klein directed projects to create a QCIT training-of-trainers and to support the QCIT’s sustainability and dissemination. She also co-developed a product line to provide the QCIT observation tool, trainings, and related materials to the public.

Kopack Klein joined Mathematica in 2009. She holds an M.A. in sociology from the Catholic University of America. She serves as an advisor for the dissemination of the QCIT to the early childhood community.