Get Updates via Email Get Updates Get our RSS Feed
  Follow Mathematica on Twitter  Share/Save/Bookmark

Photo of Martha BleekerMartha M. Bleeker
Senior Survey Researcher

Martha Bleeker, a senior survey researcher, has expertise in designing and conducting impact evaluations of school-based programs using both experimental and quasi-experimental methods.

She currently serves as the deputy project director and survey director for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s rigorous evaluation of Playworks, a program that places full-time coaches in low-income schools to provide opportunities for organized play during recess and throughout the school day. She developed and coordinated a large team of staff as it administered student and teacher surveys and collected school records, physical activity data via accelerometers, and recess observation data from 29 elementary schools in 10 school districts. She coordinated the development of district research applications and the institutional review board (IRB) package, managed the cleaning and coding of all data, and was the lead author on the first research brief.

Bleeker also served as the survey director on the Roads to Success Program, a college and career-readiness program for students in grades 7 through 12, targeted at high-poverty rural schools. In this role, she coordinated the collection of administrative records and developed and fielded three student surveys with 2,000 middle school students in 16 school districts. She cleaned and analyzed data for the impact analyses and coauthored the final report.

 

Bleeker has also been involved in assessing the impact of educational programs and services for the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences (IES). As the deputy principal investigator for the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) topic area focusing on children with emotional and behavioral disorders, she oversees a team of reviewers as they assess the effect of educational interventions on students’ problem behaviors, mental health, and learning. She also coauthored three reports for Mathematica’s Impact Evaluation of Teacher Induction Programs, documenting the impact of induction programs on the retention and teaching practices of beginning teachers in urban schools.

 

Bleeker publishes and presents widely at professional conferences for the Society for Research in Child Development, American Evaluation Association, American Educational Research Association, Society for Research on Adolescence, Great Teachers for Our City Schools, and the Society for the Study of Human Development. She holds a Ph.D. in human development and family studies, with a minor in statistics, from Pennsylvania State University.

Less Detail More Detail

Staff Profile