Jessica Mejía

Jessica Mejía is a senior education research analyst in early grade reading, teacher training, and teacher mentoring. She has almost 13 years of experience managing and supporting international education projects focusing on improving teacher literacy instruction by providing teaching and learning materials, training, and support. This has included developing curriculum and training materials, enhancing teacher mentoring programs and tools, and monitoring and assessment of reading instruction and reading outcomes. In addition, Ms. Mejía uses these experiences to improve on these same aspects for projects through research.

As a researcher, Ms. Mejía has supported multiple mixed methods studies to understand and improve early grade literacy instruction and implementation by designing instruments and collecting and analyzing qualitative data for internal RTI studies on teachers' guides, training, and teacher support. Most recently, she played a pivotal role in designing instruments and carried out qualitative data collection for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Learning at Scale study to better understand successful early literacy programs worldwide.

She has also provided technical assistance and oversight to projects focused on improving the quality of early grade reading instruction in East Africa and Latin America, including the US Agency for International Development-funded Tusome Activity, the Primary Mathematics and Reading initiative where she designed and oversaw the development of all teacher, student, and professional development materials for English and Kiswahili in Grades 1-3. She also provided technical and managerial support in several Early Grade Reading and Math Assessments in Egypt, Kenya, Nicaragua, Zambia, Ghana, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Ethiopia. She also designed and implemented teacher training modules in Nicaragua and Honduras and organized high-level meetings at the World Bank’s and the International Reading Association’s Latin America and the Caribbean Regions Conference in Peru. Ms. Mejía has almost 20 years of experience in classroom work and research in elementary reading, both internationally and in the United States. She is fluent in English and Spanish.