Margaret Burchinal

Margaret Burchinal is the senior scientist and director of the data management and analysis center at the Frank Porter Graham (FPG) Child Development Institute and a research professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Dr. Burchinal has served as the primary statistician for many educational studies of early childhood, including the 11-state Pre-Kindergarten Evaluation for the National Center for Early Learning and Development, the longitudinal study of 1300 children in NICHD Study of Early Child Care; the 4 state evaluation of child care in the Cost, Quality, and Child Outcomes Study; the 3 site study of family child care homes in the Family Child Care and Relative Care Study, and the Abecedarian and CARE Projects. As an applied methodologist, she has helped to demonstrate that sophisticated methods such as meta-analysis (See Burchinal et al., 2000), fixed-effect modeling (see NICHD ECCRN & Duncan, 2003), hierarchical linear modeling, piecewise regression (see Campbell et al, 2001), and generalized estimating equations provide educational researchers with advanced techniques to address important educational issues such as whether child care quality measures are biased (Burchinal & Cryer, 2003). In addition, she has pursued her substantive interest in early education as a means to improve school readiness for at-risk children, and is a leading contributor to this literature.