Kristin Mitchell, M.A.
Vice President, Emerging Practices

Kathryn Bangert O’Dell, M.A.
Senior Project Manager, Technical Assistance

Bill Wilkinson, M.A.
Technical Assistance Manager


Kristin Mitchell, M.A. – Vice President, Emerging Practices

Kristin Mitchell is a founding partner of Edvance Research, Inc. and serves as vice president for emerging practices. In this position she is responsible for following trends in education, and identifying and keeping educators informed about new evidence-based programs and practices that show promising results. Mitchell is a recognized leader in the areas of process and quality improvement, strategic planning and performance measurement.

Due to her extensive experience helping educators identify process and quality improvement practices, Mitchell is routinely approached by national organizations, such as the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII), to provide leadership and guidance for developing project frameworks and improvement tools.  

Mitchell was instrumental in creating an innovation guidebook series for OII and was the technical lead for three of those publications: Creating Strong District School Choice Programs; Creating Successful Magnet Schools Programs; and Alternative Routes to Teacher Certification.  

Building upon the work of the innovation guides on public School Choice and magnet programs, Mitchell designed a School Choice symposium funded by OII. The symposium brought district and state practitioners together with local sites that were featured in the guides. These meetings gave the group first-hand knowledge about implementing and expanding educational options for parents and students. 

Following her success with the guides and the choice symposium, Mitchell collaborated with OII to create www.BuildingChoice.org, an interactive online toolkit that provides practical information to districts for implementing and expanding their public school choice offerings, with the aim of improving student achievement.

Mitchell is currently leading the effort to create another series of innovation guides for the U.S. Department of Education. This series will feature distance-learning programs that are expanding opportunities for advanced coursework and evaluations of online learning initiatives.

Prior to joining Edvance Research, Mitchell was an integral part of the Education Initiative with the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC). At APQC she served as a program manager for the Baldrige in Education Initiative, a national effort bringing excellence and equity to education through the implementation of Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria and other quality tools. She also oversaw two significant collaborative benchmarking studies that examined best practices in teacher preparation programs and improving procurement processes for statewide assessments.  

In addition to her role as Edvance Research’s vice president of emerging practices, Mitchell is also the director of technical assistance for REL Southwest. As head of this unit, her focus is to help states and education organizations in the laboratory’s five-state region build capacity for making evidence-based decisions. Mitchell holds a bachelor's degree in business administration with a concentration in management, and a master's degree in communication studies, both from Texas Tech University.

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Kathryn Bangert O’Dell, M.A.- Senior Project Manager, Technical Assistance

As senior project manager for the Technical Assistance program, Kathryn O’Dell provides research-based technical assistance services.  In this capacity O’Dell works with school districts and state departments of education to identify research needs, conducts initial research evaluation, and assists with initial research responses.
 
Prior to joining Edvance Research, O’Dell worked for the California School Information Services (CSIS) Program in the Requirements Management Department, where she was responsible for managing the implementation of student electronic records transfer projects within K-12 agencies, and between K-12 and postsecondary institutions.

O’Dell has worked on a variety of K–16 student and teacher performance data projects at all levels, including classroom, school, district, county, postsecondary and state levels.  She has used multiple data collection methods and has performed both qualitative and quantitative data analyses using statistical software packages such as SPSS and SAS. 

Based on her range of experience, O’Dell is often invited to facilitate at state and national meetings to recommend ways to improve student and institution level data collection methodologies and to present ways for translating data into information.

O’Dell is a member of the American Psychological Association (APA).  She holds a master’s degree in psychology from California State University at Bakersfield, and bachelor’s degrees in both psychology and sociology from California State University at Fullerton.

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Bill Wilkinson, M.A. - Technical Assistance Manager

As Technical Assistance Manager, Bill Wilkinson leads secondary research projects in response to customer requests and organizational needs. In this role, Wilkinson will manage the day-to-day activities necessary for the successful resolution of requests for educational research and design information and facilitate activities to increase the awareness of, and need for, educational research. 

Immediately prior to joining Edvance Research, Wilkinson established the research department at the supplemental publishing subsidiary of the Harcourt Education Group, where he served as its vice president and directed activities in instructional materials evaluation, market research, legislative policy analysis, and business intelligence.

Wilkinson has been working in education and education-related organizations since 1980. Originally beginning his career as a classroom teacher, he then worked with McGraw-Hill before eventually moving into community education with the U.S. Department of Defense, where he became intimate with the federal regulatory environment, as well as grant and procurement processes. After leaving government service, Wilkinson managed certification testing programs at Educational Testing Service and test development and research efforts in postsecondary education at Harcourt Assessment before ultimately moving into policy analysis and market research.

Wilkinson earned a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Dayton and holds a master’s degree in education from the University of Texas at San Antonio.  

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