Ishita Ahmed

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2021 - 2022 Academic Year

Measurement Matters: Designing and Validating Holistic Child Development Measures in Rural Bangladesh

To challenge the assumption that child development measures can be universally applied across contexts, Ahmed proposes to design measures of executive function and self-regulation with children ages 10-12 years old in rural Bangladesh. Ahmed will integrate these measures into a long-term follow-up survey of a randomized controlled trial examining the effect of cash, food, and nutrition education interventions on child development. Ahmed's research will (1) develop contextually relevant measures of EF and SR for middle childhood in a rural LMIC context and (2) demonstrate how mitigating development risk factors through different social supports can impact children's development in the long-term.

Ishita Ahmed, School of Education

Ishita Ahmed is a PhD candidate in developmental and psychological sciences and international comparative education at Stanford University. Her research examines how to promote equitable education for marginalized communities in the U.S. and low-and-middle-income countries. Ahmed's work aims to improve measurement of psychological constructs that contribute to student outcomes and integrate them into economic analyses of education intervention effectiveness. In particular, she is working on examining how measures of executive function (EF) and self-regulation (SR) can be designed and adapted using qualitative interviews in Bangladesh. She will use the qualitative interviews to inform tasks and items on direct assessment, assessor-report, and parent-report of EF and SR. Overall, Ahmed's aim is to center the voices of local communities to reduce global inequities in child development.

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