Education

Ph.D., Psychology, M.A., Psychology, Johns Hopkins University
B.A., Psychology, Duke University

Expertise

K-12 education policy and program evaluation

Biography

Diane M. Monrad is Director of the South Carolina Educational Policy Center and a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policies at the University of South Carolina. She has managed a variety of educational evaluation and policy research studies for the past 30 years. Dr. Monrad has extensive research experience in program evaluation, educational policy analysis, and assessment of educational reform programs. She is currently a principal investigator for Richland Two's International Baccalaureate magnet program, a co-principal investigator for South Carolina Department of Education's Summer Reading Project, and principal investigator for SCEPC's ongoing study of school climate. She was one of the principal investigators for South Carolina's Reading First Initiative and for Richland Two's 2004-2007 magnet schools program (ImPACT). Dr. Monrad has also served as principal investigator on an investigation of gap-closing schools, an analysis of the state's gifted education program, an evaluation of the state's teacher specialist program in low-performing schools, and a four-year effort to develop a new principal evaluation system for the state. She is the author of numerous publications and reports, and co-author of a book on assessment titled Put to the Test.

Selected research studies

Current research projects include the evaluation of magnet school programs in Richland School District Two and Lexington-Richland School District 5, a study of the relationship between school climate and student achievement, and a study of state summer reading programs.

Selected publications

DiStefano, C., Mindrila, D., & Monrad, D.M. (2013). Investigating factorial invariance of teacher climate factors across school organizational levels. In M.E. Khine (ed.) Application of structural equation modeling in educational research and practice. 255-273, 2013, Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.

Select presentations

Mindrila, D., DiStefano, C., & Monrad, D.M. School climate latent profiles: School and district level investigation using teacher perception of climate. Presentation at the Modern Modeling Methods Conference, University of Connecticut, May 22, 2013.

Mindrila, D., DiStefano, C., & Monrad, D.M. Confirmatory factor analysis: Testing factorial invariance of teacher climate factors across school organizational levels. Presentation at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA, April 29, 2013.

Dickenson, T.S., Monrad, D.M., Morgan, G.B., Bennett, H., Doswell, B., Wills, P., Ishikawa, T., Mindrila, D., Ene, M., Leighton, E., Burgess, Y., & Askew, K. Evaluation of a summer reading project's effectiveness to mitigate learning loss. Presentation at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA, April 27, 2013.

Selected awards

Received the Friend of Gifted Award from the South Carolina Consortium for Gifted Education (SCCGE) for advocacy and professional service on behalf of the children of South Carolina at the 2006 SCCGE annual conference in Charleston, South Carolina.