Biography

Gail L. Zellman is a social and clinical psychologist with years of experience conducting and leading research on child and youth policy. Her research interests include measurement of child care quality, parent school involvement, child abuse, and prenatal substance exposure. She is particularly interested in the contributions of parents and parenting behaviors to child health, emotional development, and academic outcomes. Dr. Zellman has also focused research attention on efforts made by other institutions, e.g., schools and health care providers, to meet children's needs and enhance parents' abilities to help their children. Her work has included analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data, as well as survey design and analysis. Dr. Zellman is principal investigator of a longitudinal evaluation of a child care Quality Rating System developed by Qualistar, a Colorado-based child care agency. That work, to be completed this year, has carefully analyzed a number of frequently-used measures of child care quality, developed and preliminarily tested a new quality measure, and has led to the establishment of a Consortium to develop better early child care and education quality rating improvement systems. A planning conference for the Consortium was held at RAND in January, 2006, and fundraising for the planning phase is underway.