Claudia A. Gentile
Associate Director, Surveys and Information Services; Senior Survey Researcher

Gentile, who joined Mathematica in 2009, is project director of a study for Teach For America (TFA), exploring whether the Teaching As Leadership rubric (TFA’s classroom observation tool) can be used to reliably assess the quality of teachers’ practices. Before joining Mathematica, Gentile worked for Educational Testing Service (ETS) as a researcher and test developer. She participated in the development of the PRAXIS I, II, and III teacher licensure and certification examinations as well as the new Test Of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). In particular, she led the development of a new score reporting system designed to provide diagnostic information to TOEFL test takers. As director of scoring for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), she supervised the training and scoring of constructed-response and performance-assessment questions for all NAEP subject areas. As NAEP survey director, she supervised the development of student, teacher, and school questionnaires for five subject areas.

Gentile directed three national writing portfolio studies, developing procedures for complex data collection, training data collection staff, developing analytic rubrics, conducting training sessions, and overseeing analyses and reporting. She also directed studies exploring students’ creative writing, constructed-response reading questions, effective classroom writing assignments, and parents’ influence on children’s reading motivation and reading achievement.

Gentile directed a number of program evaluations, including studies of Rhode Island’s third-grade writing assessment, Tulane University’s freshman writing program, a New York City writing-across-the-curriculum program, and a computer-assisted critical thinking program, developing procedures for using students’ writing portfolios, teacher interviews, and surveys to assess program effectiveness.

Gentile has provided expertise in literacy instruction and assessment to state departments of education in California, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Washington, designing new test items and rubrics. She also developed the scoring rubric for New York’s Early Literacy Record and the data collection procedures for New Jersey’s Early Literacy Profile. She has provided professional development services to more than 15 school districts in five states. As project director of the Literacy Task Force of the Trenton City/ETS partnership, she coordinated teacher and administrator professional development and parent outreach programs. Currently, she serves as an adjunct faculty member at the College of New Jersey, teaching graduate courses in research methodology and teacher research.

Gentile publishes and presents widely at professional conferences for the American Educational Research Association, National Council on Measurement in Education, Council of Chief State School Officers, National Council of Teachers of English, International Reading Association, American Association of College Teacher Education, National Staff Development Council, and International Language Testing Association. She has a Ph.D. in English education from Syracuse University.