Alyn Turner

About Alyn Turner

Dr. Alyn Turner specializes in designing and conducting mixed-methods evaluations and research studies to address program- and policy-relevant issues in the areas of early childhood and K-12 education. Turner serves as the Director of Quantitative Research, where she oversees a team of ten quantitative researchers and provides strategic oversight and direction for a multitude of evaluation projects and research studies.

Turner also serves as co-director for the Philadelphia Education Research Consortium, a research practice-partnership with the School District of Philadelphia with a focus on what keeps Philadelphia’s high school students on track to graduation, engaged, and acquiring the competencies they will need to succeed in adulthood. In addition to her director roles, Turner currently serves as a Principal Investigator on a five-year Education and Innovation Research grant awarded to the Children’s Literacy Initiative to develop and evaluate a comprehensive preschool curriculum and professional development program for pre-K teachers. Since joining RFA in 2017, Turner has led a range of research efforts, including providing technical support and research expertise to Pennsylvania’s Office of Child Development and Early Learning for advancing systems-level initiatives to improve early child care and education quality throughout the commonwealth Pennsylvania; a mixed-methods study of the Head Start workforce in Detroit; and a multi-year descriptive study of early reading outcomes in over 35 New York City public schools participating in Teaching Matters’ Early Reading Matters program. Prior to joining RFA, Turner was a research scholar at the Center for Women’s Health and Health Disparities Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Turner holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and an M.S. in Population Health Sciences from the same institution.