Susan Sprachman
Senior Fellow

As senior survey director for the Universal Preschool Child Outcomes Survey for First 5 LA, she helped develop a fully bilingual assessment using conceptual scoring. She also developed the training plan and led the training.

Sprachman was the senior survey director for the Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES), a study of children, families, and the preschool experience of children in Head Start. She was the senior advisor for a study of the Experience Corps. This project included interviewing and assessing first, second, and third grade children who were in a special mentoring program. For the Early Head Start, Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing, and Growing Up in Poverty studies, multisite projects with complex training and management requirements, she directed the surveys that provided critical policy-relevant information on family formation and child development.

Sprachman has led the development of a number of measures, including (1) the Respect for Differences Scale, which measures the ways in which preschool programs promote respect for home cultures, (2) the Language Interaction Snapshot (LISn), which examines the language use of teachers in classes with bilingual children, (3) the Teacher Activity Snapshot (TAS) used in FACES 2006 to provide context for classroom observations, and (4) the Child Caregiver Assessment Tool for Relatives (CCAT-R) to measure the quality of care provided by informal caregivers. She was also part of the team that developed the preschool version of the Desired Results Development Profiles-Revised (DRDP-R) for the California Department of Education.

Sprachman publishes and presents widely at professional conferences for Head Start, the Society for Research in Child Development, American Educational Research Association, American Association for Public Opinion Research, and other groups. She holds an M.A. in crosscultural studies from the University of Chicago.