
Jeff Kosovich, PhD
Current Role
Jeff Kosovich is a Senior Evaluation Associate and the lead evaluator for the population health portfolio in Societal Impact. In this role he contributes to the design, implementation, analysis, reporting, and learning from various initiatives. This involves deploying existing evaluation tools as well as developing and testing innovative methods and tools.
He is currently working to develop program evaluations that are simultaneously formative for participants, diagnostic for program developers, and summative for clients and funders. Major initiatives include The Collective Leadership Initiative, PropelNext, The Community Equity Indicator, and CCL Reflections.
Experience
Jeff is an educational psychologist with a background in research methods, psychological measurement, and human learning & motivation. His graduate research focused on applied educational interventions in community college math. His methodological work includes implementation fidelity in educational interventions, large-scale randomized controlled trials, and psychometric validation. More recently, he has conducted program evaluation in population health, higher education, and the nonprofit sector with a subtheme of leadership in rural communities.
Jeff’s background is heavily rooted in motivation research for education and methodological work, and he works at the intersection of content and methods. His prior research on motivation focused on students in classroom settings and their perceptions of value. Methodologically, his background is in quantitative psychology and measurement with a focus on field experiments, implementation fidelity, and advanced statistics. One of his goals is to develop better measurement practices for applied research by balancing technical demands of high quality measurement and practical concerns of operating in real-life contexts (i.e., Pragmatic Measurement).
Educational Background
Jeff has a PhD in Educational Research: Applied Developmental Science from the University of Virginia, an MA in Psychological Science: Quantitative Methods from James Madison University, and a BA in Psychology from Northern Illinois University.
Honors, Awards, Grants
Jeff has received several honors, including the following:
- Carnegie Alpha Lab Research Network Fellow, Carnegie Foundation, 2013–2014.
- Virginia Education Science Training Fellow, University of Virginia, 2013–2017.
- Removing Barriers to Success: An Integrative Expectancy-Value Intervention (NSF).
Areas of Expertise
Engagement & Motivation Evaluation Networks Population Health- Educational Research
- Psychological Measurement
- Quantitative Data Analysis
- Research Methods