Harshini Shah

Harshini Shah has expertise in collaborating with stakeholders to design and implement qualitative and quantitative studies to evaluate early childhood programs that serve young children and their families. She specializes in developing and adapting measures and conducting trainings on their use in early childhood settings.

Shah is the project director and survey director for a study that aims to understand mental and behavioral health supports for children, families, and staff in Head Start. She is also the survey director and deputy project director on the Head Start REACH project, which aims to improve understanding of how Head Start programs recruit, select, enroll, and retain families who most need comprehensive services. Both studies involve using qualitative and quantitative methods to collect comprehensive data that provide information that practitioners and policymakers can use for program improvement.

Shah directed a pilot study that adapted the Quality of Caregiver-Child Interactions for Infants and Toddlers tool (designed for centers and family child care settings) for family, friend, and neighborhood settings. She was also the principal investigator on a study that explored the ways in which measures of high-quality child care can include friend, family, and neighbor care.

Previously, Shah led a scan of measures designed to assess teachers’ and caregivers’ competencies and developed a compendium of measures. She was the deputy survey director and measurement co-task lead for the 2017 Early Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey, where she examined and adapted measures to assess classroom and home visit quality, parent engagement, family well-being, and children’s language and social-emotional development. She also developed protocols for conducting observations to assess the quality of Early Head Start classrooms and home visits. She was the deputy survey director and measurement task lead for the Evaluation of Preschool Special Education Practices, a randomized controlled trial of an intervention for preschool-age children in inclusive classrooms. 

Shah has conducted systematic reviews for projects such as the Learning about Infant and Toddler Early Education Services and the What Works Clearinghouse.

Shah joined Mathematica in 2011. She is a reviewer for the National Research Conference on Early Childhood and the Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting. She holds a Ph.D. in human development and family studies from Pennsylvania State University.