Tiffany Berry is a research associate professor in the Division of Behavioral & Organizational Sciences. She is a core faculty member in two concentrations: Positive Developmental Psychology and Evaluation and Applied Research Methods. She regularly teaches and provides research supervision to master’s and doctoral students in both concentrations. In addition, she is an active educational program evaluator and associate director at the Claremont Evaluation Center (CEC) at CGU.
Dr. Berry received her PhD from Claremont Graduate University in Developmental Psychology & Evaluation, specializing in the development of intrinsic motivation among youth who participate in afterschool programs. This research led to her working as an Internal Evaluation Consultant for one of the nation’s largest after-school programs, Los Angeles’s Better Educated Students for Tomorrow (LA’s BEST). This experience highlighted the importance of using evaluation to collaborate authentically with front-line practitioners as well as the need to connect developmental science to real-world practice. Not only do programs have the potential to become stronger through evaluation, but developmental theory can be strengthened by contextualizing program strategies and measuring youth development in context.
Dr. Berry’s research stems from her experience evaluating educational programs that aim to improve developmental and educationally significant outcomes among children and adolescents. She has established multi-year partnerships with several programs, including afterschool, college readiness, social-emotional learning, early childhood education, youth sports, teacher professional development, and educational curricula. She regularly examines the theoretical foundation in which they are based, the quality of program implementation, and program impact. Evaluation findings are used to drive organizational improvement and satisfy accountability requirements. These partnerships also afford graduate students experiential training opportunities to learn the scientific practice of evaluation, how to collaborate effectively with diverse practitioners, and become fluent in the bidirectionality between theory and practice.
Since 2004, Dr. Berry and her students have disseminated their evaluations broadly. She has published over 75 technical evaluation reports, published peer-reviewed articles in leading evaluation journals (American Journal of Evaluation and New Directions for Evaluation) and youth development journals (Journal of Early Adolescence), and presented her findings at scientific and practitioner conferences. In 2014, Dr. Berry was invited to serve as a member of the Evaluation and Research Advisory Committee (ERAC) with the Afterschool Division of the California Department of Education.