Brooks Bowden is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Bowden serves as the Director of the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education and Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s IES funded Predoctoral Training Program in Interdisciplinary Methods for Field-based Research in Education. She is an Editor of AERA’s flagship policy journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.
Professor Bowden’s work is motivated by the goal to improve children’s trajectories by minimizing barriers to learning and engagement in school related to poverty and vulnerability. Her research falls into three domains: 1) methodological improvements in economic evaluation, 2) supplemental support for early literacy and development, and 3) policy partnership research examining student engagement and access to resources. Across these domains, her work intends to address current and persistent issues by providing rigorous and actionable evidence to inform policy and practice.
Professor Bowden’s work spans the fields of education policy, economics of education, and program and policy evaluation. She is a co-author of the primary text on cost-effectiveness, Economic Evaluation in Education: Cost-Effectiveness and Benefit-Cost Analysis, 3rd Edition. Her work was recently published in the American Economics Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, AERA Open, and Early Childhood Research Quarterly.
Professor Bowden received early career awards from the Teachers College Alumni Association, the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, and the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. She was recently awarded research funding by the State of North Carolina, the Institute for Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education, Penn Global, and the Neubauer Foundation.
