Description of Research Expertise

Areas of Expertise

Urban education
Primary education
Parenting and child development
Home/school partnerships

Professional Biography

Before joining the standing faculty at Penn GSE in 1998 as Clayton Professor in Urban Education, Dr. Slaughter-Defoe taught for 20 years at Northwestern University’s School of Education. Prior to going to Northwestern in 1977, she had served on the faculties of the department of psychiatry at Howard University in Washington, D.C. (1967–68), the Child Study Center at Yale University (1968–70), and the Committee on Human Development and department of education at the University of Chicago (1970–77). At Northwestern, she was a member of the Institute for Policy Research Studies and the department of African American studies. Her dissertation research, for which she received the distinguished research award from Pi Lambda Theta, was conducted with a Chicago-area Head Start population of mothers and children. Much later, in 1994, she was cited by the American Psychological Association for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy. She has completed government-funded research in the area of middle school-aged children’s and families’ experiences in diverse urban private school settings. Her publications include an edited volume on this topic (Greenwood Press, 1988) that is a “classic first.” Dr. Slaughter-Defoe is currently a member of the Board of Visitors of the Learning, Research and Development Center (LRDC) of the University of Pittsburgh and has been a member of the Governing Council of the Society for Research in Child Development. Formerly a member of the editorial boards of Child Development (associate editor), Applied Developmental Psychology, and Educational Researcher, she is currently a member of Human Development and NHSA Dialog: A Research-To-Practice Journal for the Early Intervention Field. In June 2007, the University of Chicago awarded her its Lifetime Professional Achievement Citation.

Research Interests and Current Projects

Dr. Slaughter-Defoe’s research interests include culture, primary education, and home-school relations that facilitate in-school academic achievement. She concluded a collaborative research evaluation of the Comer School Development Program, a parent-focused school reform model implemented in several lower-income Chicago schools. Papers were presented at the International Conference on the Study of Behavioral Development in Beijing, China (summer 2000) and at the 2001 biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. New ethnographic research in Philadelphia focusing on the study of the learning environments in the primary grades of two Philadelphia elementary schools that are successfully serving 40 percent or more lower-income and African-American children began in the fall of 2001. In 2006-07, she and partners implemented two child intervention projects that are currently being written up: (a) Go-Girls, an NSF-funded dissemination project with middle-school age girls; and (b) Summer Freedom School, a Children’s Defense Fund literacy program reaching 100 K–5th grade children in West Philadelphia. The Go-Girl project is discussed in a forthcoming fall/winter 2010/11 special issue on the effects of voluntary mentoring on mentors (Slaughter-Defoe is guest editor) of Educational Horizons, and the 2007 Summer Freedom School project is the subject of a 26-minute film emphasizing quality education for African American youth that was sponsored by Penn GSE, for which Dr. Slaughter-Defoe is a co-producer.