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Dr. Heather B. Weiss is the Founder and Director of Harvard Family Research
Project (HFRP) and is a Senior Research Associate and Lecturer at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education. From its beginning in 1983, the HFRP's mission
has been to help create more effective practices, interventions, and policies
to support children's successful development from birth to adulthood. To achieve
this mission, Dr. Weiss and her colleagues conduct, synthesize, and disseminate
research and evaluation information and develop tools that encourage professional
and organizational learning, support evaluation, continuous improvement and
accountability, and that spark innovation.
HFRP publishes The Evaluation Exchange,
a quarterly national review of the latest evaluation thinking and practice in
key areas of child and family policy. It has developed HFRP's national
database of evaluations of out-of-school time and youth programs and uses
it to inform policy and practice and to shape the design of strategic evaluations
to build the usable knowledge base for this growing field.
Heather and her colleagues created the national Family
Involvement Network of Educators (FINE), a growing network of over 3,000
people committed to family and community involvement in children's learning.
HFRP supports this web-based network by providing the latest research, documenting
innovative practices and programs, and highlighting new professional development
tools.
HFRP also developed the Home
Visit Forum, a group of national home visit programs who work together to
get and use evaluation to improve their services.
Dr. Weiss writes, speaks, and advises on programs and polices for children
and families and serves on the advisory boards of many public and private organizations.
She is a consultant and advisor to numerous foundations on strategic grantmaking
and evaluation. Her latest publications include several articles reporting on
her longitudinal study of ways family involvement in children's learning promotes
development and school success, a book about how to involve families and communities
in children's learning and development, papers on how to measure and to encourage
youth participation in after school and youth programs, and a paper on the use
of data and evaluation in democracies.
Dr. Weiss received her doctorate in Education and Social Policy from the Harvard
Graduate School of Education and she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the
Yale Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy.
See the publications Heather
Weiss has authored or coauthored as director at HFRP.
Email Heather Weiss at heather_weiss@harvard.edu.
View
Weiss' Faculty Profile on the Harvard Graduate School of Education website.
Download a high-resolution (300dpi)
version of the photo above (4.7MB Zip file).
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