HGSE News: Measuring and Effecting Change (Claudia Pineda profile)

Claudia Pineda's work has always been about finding ways to make positive interventions in people's lives. As an undergraduate in Colombia, she led workshops focused on identity issues with at-risk sixth graders, worked with pregnant women at a health center in a poor neighborhood, and participated in a child abuse prevention network.

Claudia Pineda, Ed.D. candidate in Human Development and Psychology

Here at HGSE, where she is a doctoral candidate in the Human Development and Psychology area, Pineda is zeroing in on how to measure the effects of positive interventions in children's lives. Her long-term goal is learning how to use that research to develop and implement effective and culturally specific intervention programs.

Measuring Effective Interventions
Pineda has worked closely with Kargman Assistant Professor Michael Nakkula in Project IF, "Inventing the Future," a program aimed at helping Greater Boston area students from low-income families create and develop opportunities for their futures. Her involvement in this work reflects her interest in program outcomes that are difficult to assess using traditional quantitative measures such as grade point average or standardized tests. She observes, for example, that although some students participating in Project IF did not show improvements in their academic subjects, they did improve in other important ways.

"Standardized test scores on a kid at Charlestown High may not have gone up," offers Pineda. "But if you ask the adults who work with him, they say 'he connects with me better'...But how do we measure these kinds of changes in different children, and in different communities?" Pineda believes that interventions targeting at-risk youth take longer to show results because those interventions are based on the development of relationships.

She has also found that prevention programs founders tend to emphasize program evaluation results that are not consistent with the slow process of changing human behavior and development. As a result, programs that are good for children may not secure funding and may fade out. As a researcher, Claudia would like to address questions of measurement and effect policy by showing the ways in which programs are contributing to children's capacity to connect to school and create positive futures for themselves under adverse circumstances.

Engaging with Colombian Youth
Two years ago, Pineda began working with the Harvard Immigration Projects (HIP) as part of the team that studies Dominican students in a local Boston high school. Although Colombian immigration to the U.S. had increased rapidly in recent years, there is very little research exploring the school experiences of Colombian youth in the U.S. Learning how Colombian immigrant youth engage with school, she explains, can lead to the design of more effective interventions that strengthen these children's cultural and ethnic identity around positive aspects.

Spurred by her HIP research and work with the mentoring component of Project IF, Pineda and a few colleagues recently designed an initiative connecting Colombian professionals with low-income Colombian youth from the East Boston area through a Colombian folkloric dance group called BAJUCOL. The group conducted workshops relating to school, college, and immigration laws for the students. They also worked with them on putting together their annual dance performance, which more than 800 people attended. Pineda and her team hope that those activities will result in strong relationships which will become a source of support to help students overcome an environment that, she says, "is not promoting their development."

What Comes Next
For her dissertation, Pineda plans to develop valid measures of students' conceptions of the future and of school engagement that can capture the complex experiences of these children. In the future, she hopes to provide studies that can provide educators with tools to assess the effects of prevention programs aimed at culturally diverse populations, and to work in research endeavors devoted to the understanding of how programs can influence and open future opportunities for disenfranchised youth. "My ambition, my dream, is to be able to generate research here that could be implemented here, as well as in Colombia and in other parts of Latin America."

For More Information
Visit the Project IF Web site and the Harvard Immigration Projects Web site.

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