July 2024

By Hannah Kumbroch

Meet Elisa Garcia, a Principal Education Researcher and Senior Manager in SRI’s Education Division. In this interview, we delve into her current work, what led her to this role, and her insights on how we can better support multilingual learners.

Current Projects

Garcia’s work focuses on early childhood education, particularly related to multilingual learners, social-emotional skills, executive functions, and language and literacy development. At SRI, she currently leads a large-scale evaluation of an early childhood program in Pennsylvania in partnership with Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning (CHS). CHS has developed a “whole-child, two-generation approach to promote student learning, family economic security, and family mental health” serving children birth to 5 years at no cost to families, Garcia explains.

Garcia also co-leads evaluations of social-emotional interventions in preschool and kindergarten classrooms, which she says “use a tiered framework to provide support to children at different levels of risk.” She also leads a project on multilingual learners, using data from the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey. “We are conducting statistical analyses to characterize dual language learners’ English and Spanish vocabulary skills at the start and end of Head Start,” she says, which will allow for a more nuanced understanding of how these early educational environments relate to the development of DLL children’s bilingual strengths.

Path to This Work

Garcia’s interest in educational experiences and child development was sparked during her college years as a psychology major. “We did one unit on development in context, and we learned about these landmark studies from the sixties—high-quality early care programs like the Perry Preschool Project and the Carolina Abecedarian Project,” she recalls. Inspired by these findings and other comprehensive early education models, Garcia developed a deep interest in the impacts of early childhood education.

“I was really taken with the idea of giving children early opportunities and starting them on a better path,” she shares. This interest led her to focus her senior thesis on multilingual learners in preschool, an interest that propelled her through grad school and continues to shape her professional career.

How can we better support multilingual learners?

Garcia’s longstanding passion for early childhood education shines through in her work at SRI through her efforts to identify barriers and support educational equity for all students and their families. Garcia highlights the importance of strong coaching models, understanding children’s language backgrounds, and improving assessment tools for young dual language learners. “We lack well-validated assessments for young multilingual learners, and even when we have assessments in multiple languages, they may not capture the complete picture of a child’s skills,” Garcia explains. “Translating effective practices into the classroom is challenging due to competing demands on teachers’ time and resources.” Her work emphasizes the need to provide evidence-based practices and actionable, accessible strategies for teachers given that they often lack the time and bandwidth to implement new programs with fidelity while managing other demands.

Read about one of Garcia’s recent projects here and her full bio here.