Jelena Obradović

Dr. Jelena Obradović is a developmental psychologist, a professor at Stanford University in the Developmental and Psychological Sciences Program in the Graduate School of Education, and the associate director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood. Her research examines how the interplay of children’s physiological stress arousal, executive functions (EFs), self-regulatory behaviors, and quality of caregiving and educational environments contributes to their health, learning, and well-being over time. She has created innovative, scalable assessments of EF skills and learning-relevant behaviors (e.g., persistence, challenge preference), and formed research-practice partnerships to include larger and more diverse groups of children in empirical research that identifies contextually and culturally relevant ways to promote their development. She is leading an international initiative to develop multi-method, multi-informant assessment tools and guidelines to conduct mixed-method studies of how EF skills and behaviors are expressed and leveraged in different settings to support culturally relevant learning outcomes. She serves as a scientific advisor on domestic and global assessment initiatives.

King Center Supported Research

2023 - 2024 Academic Year | Global Development Research Funding

Global Study Validating Novel, Open-source Survey Tools for Parent and Teacher Report of Children's Executive Function Behaviors

Although executive functions (EFs) are a strong and consistent predictor of children’s adaptation and academic success, a lack of methodologically rigorous, contextually relevant, and freely-available EF assessments limit efforts to identify experiences, programs, and policies that are effective in promoting these foundational learning skills. The proposed project will validate and disseminate a novel and open-source survey specifically created to measure parent- and teacher-reported child EF across a variety of global settings. The validation study will leverage existing efforts in Argentina, China, Ghana, Haiti, Mexico, and South Africa to ensure that the measure is broadly applicable and equitable across contexts.