Elizabeth Hentschel is a PhD Candidate in the Population Health Sciences program at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, based at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the Global Health and Population Department. She is an Early Childhood Development (ECD) researcher who specializes in in low- and middle-income contexts (LMICs). She has two primary research focuses:
The first is using psychometric analyses to better understand measurement pathways that influence children's early development. Elizabeth has consulted for the World Health Organization (WHO), where she lead the development of two evidence-informed, universal measures for assessing responsive care and early learning to be used for both monitoring and evaluation, and training. Along with my co-collaborators, Elizabeth lead the validation study of the tools in rural Pakistan, and the training of partners around the world in how to implement the tools. Prior to these tools, no existing measure adequately distinguished between these two concepts, leaving programs and governments unable to adequately monitor them as separate and distinct entities. These tools provide programs with relevant information to make decisions in the areas of the NCF that require improvement by promoting both responsive care and early learning as two distinct measures and measuring them in a uniform way.
The second is early childhood care and education, which a specific focus on childcare in LMICs. Most recently, Elizabeth consulted for the World Bank’s Pakistan ECD team on how to develop a strategy to guide World Bank Group investments in early childhood education (ECE) and how to engage in policy discussions around ECE In the country. In this role she analyzed publicly-available micro-datasets and lead the development of a Gallup phone survey focused on assessing the state of child development under the age of 3 in Pakistan. She has also conducted several evaluations of childcare programs in Vietnam and Kenya, including a post-test quasi-experimental evaluation of a training program for childcare providers in the industrialized zones of Vietnam in collaboration with the Research and Training Centre for Community development (RTCCD) in Hà Nôi.