Staff
Adrienne A. Smith
Adrienne A. Smith, Research Associate at Horizon Research, Inc., received her Ph.D. in Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), with a concentration in Educational Psychology, Measurement, and Evaluation. Prior to earning her doctorate, she received a Bachelor’s of Science Degree in Psychology, also from UNC-CH, and a Master’s degree in Elementary Education from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Before joining HRI, Dr. Smith taught third grade, and later served as a Graduate Fellow at the Carolina Institute for Public Policy, where her work focused on measuring policy impacts and conducting formative and summative evaluations, including several projects investigating impacts of teacher and principal incentives. At HRI, Dr. Smith develops research designs and conducts quantitative analyses including multi-level modeling, value-added modeling, item-response theory, factor analyses, and structural equation modeling. She is an expert in using advanced statistical packages such as SPSS, HLM, and Mplus to examine outcomes such as teacher content knowledge, pedagogical practices, and student performance. She recently assisted on the Developing a Research Agenda for Understanding the Influence of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics project. Dr. Smith manages Horizon's work on the evaluation of the National Science Foundation’s Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering program. She is also involved in other research evaluations funded by NSF, including an evaluation of the ATOMS (Accomplished Elementary Teachers of Mathematics and Science) program housed at North Carolina State University.