Donald Barfield, A.B.D.
President

Eric Rolfhus, Ph.D.
Senior Researcher

Chuck Wilkins, Ph.D.
Senior Statistician

Lauren Decker, Ph.D.
Researcher

Jessica Brite, M.S.
Research Associate

Ally Ibarra
Executive Assistant

Donald Barfield, A.B.D. – President

Don Barfield is a founding partner of Edvance Research, Inc. As president, he is responsible for the overall operations of the company. He has more than 20 years of executive leadership in public, non-profit and for-profit educational organizations, and his guidance has resulted in the successful delivery of major research and development initiatives.

Prior to joining Edvance Research, Barfield was an executive at test publisher Harcourt Assessment, first as vice president of business development and sales. In that position Barfield unified the company’s education and clinical sales organizations and refocused the sales force on customer needs to provide integrated customer solutions. As the company’s vice president of educational products, Barfield oversaw all development activities, including research, content development, psychometrics and editorial, related to a broad range of education assessments, including Web-based summative and formative achievement assessments, as well as ability, diagnostic and language proficiency tests.

Barfield spent a large portion of his career at Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development, and was a founding manager of its successor company, WestEd. As WestEd’s deputy director and chief development officer, Barfield focused on institutional development while also playing a substantial role in the organization’s mathematics and science program areas, evaluation research, and the expansion of the human development program. Under Barfield’s leadership, the organization enjoyed rapid and sustained growth.

Barfield has also served as an assistant superintendent in the San Francisco Unified School District with responsibility for all district-level research, planning, assessment, evaluation and information processing. As the District’s director of research testing and evaluation, Barfield coordinated all research and evaluation activities for 120 schools and developed management strategies to improve instructional programs and increase student achievement.

At various points in his career Barfield has also been an independent consultant, specializing in educational program evaluation; teacher and administrator professional development; student, adult and organizational learning; student performance in critical thinking skills and language acquisition; management information system design and implementation; and the assessment and development of desegregation systems.

As a graduate student at Harvard University, Barfield was an instructor in undergraduate sociology courses, as well as a graduate instructor in statistical methods, and he also supervised undergraduate research projects and directed research on race relations.

Barfield has published numerous papers, such as Longitudinal Analysis of Student and School Performance: St. Louis Public Schools, 1989 – 1994. He is a member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and is considered an expert on school desegregation.

Barfield participated in one of the first efforts to establish principles for good research science in education as a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Scientific Principles in Educational Research Committee, which published the 2002 report, Scientific Research in Education. Barfield also participated in the California Department of Education’s Academic Performance Index (API) Technical Design Group, and he serves on the board of directors of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, which focuses on all aspects of science research.

As Associate Laboratory Director for REL Southwest, Barfield is responsible for all research within REL Southwest. He assures that all laboratory work is coordinated and completed on time and reflects the highest level of quality, consistent with the standards developed by the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC).

Barfield holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology with honors from the University of California at Riverside, as well as a master’s degree in sociology from Harvard University. He has also completed all of the coursework required for a doctorate in sociology and urban planning at Harvard.

Back to top
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Eric Rolfhus, Ph.D.- Senior Researcher

Dr. Eric Rolfhus has thirteen years of experience conducting rigorous lab and field-based research, with special emphasis on test development and psychometrics for both group and individually administered psychological and educational assessments. 

At Edvance Research, Dr. Rolfhus designs randomized controlled trials to study topics such as response to intervention (RTI) and collaborative strategic reading (CSR), and conducts research on a variety of other topics, such as college readiness.

Dr. Rolfhus joined Edvance Research from Harcourt Assessment, where he was co-research director for the Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children® – Fourth Edition (WISC®-IV).  He also served as methodologist and psychometrician for a number of other individually administered psychological assessments.  Past research work includes projects in foreign-language test adaptation, small-sample test norming, lifespan intellectual development, and non-cognitive predictors of performance and knowledge acquisition.

Prior to joining Harcourt, Dr. Rolfhus conducted post-doctorate research in cognitive aging at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech).  He is a member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the American Psychological Association (APA), the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) and the National Academy of Neuropsychology (NAN).

Dr. Rolfhus holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Minnesota.  He also earned both a master’s degree and a doctorate in cognitive psychology from the University of Minnesota.

Back to top
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chuck Wilkins, Ph.D.-Senior Statistician

As senior statistician, Dr. Chuck Wilkins is responsible for overseeing the methodology of research studies, such as statistical design, power analysis, statistical consulting, and a variety of statistical analyses.

Dr. Wilkins joined Edvance Research from Harcourt Assessment, where he was a senior psychometrician.  In that capacity, Dr. Wilkins developed norms and performed advanced statistical analyses for many of the company’s standardized tests.  He also conducted research on innovative norming methods, such as inferential norming, as well as issues related to small sample sizes, simulation studies and many other topics.

Dr. Wilkins has been a researcher at the Navy Personnel Research and Development Center, where he worked on projects such as computerized adaptive testing, neural networks and Monte Carlo simulations.  He also worked at Baylor University with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology and the Institute of Graduate Statistics, where he was the coordinator of the biostatistics program and taught courses in biostatistics and survival analysis.

Dr. Wilkins is a member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME). 

He holds a Ph.D. in quantitative psychology from Johns Hopkins University and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Back to top
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lauren Decker, Ph.D.– Researcher

At Edvance Research, Dr. Decker serves as a researcher on a variety of studies, including the alignment of college readiness standards in mathematics. In addition, she is part of the Edvance research team working on the development of databases that include leading indicators that allow educators to utilize this data to provide timely intervention, resulting in positive student achievement.

Prior to joining Edvance Research, Dr. Decker was a teaching assistant at the University of Virginia, primarily in Correlation and Regression Analysis, as well as Child Development. She has extensive research experience in social and emotional learning intervention, in particular the Responsive Classroom Approach. She has analyzed data on pre-service teachers as part of the Carnegie Teachers for a New Era project.

She is a member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), American Evaluation Association (AEA), American Psychological Association (APA), and Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD). Dr. Decker has also served as a reviewer for Early Education and Development, NHSA Dialog, and Urban Education. Dr. Decker was the 2004 recipient of the Institute of Education Sciences Pre-doctoral Interdisciplinary Research Training grant.

Dr. Decker holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from The Pennsylvania State University and both a master’s in Educational Psychology and a doctorate degree in Risk & Prevention in Education Science from the University of Virginia.

Back to top

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Jessica Brite, M.S. -  Research Associate

Jessica Brite joins the Edvance Research team in the role of Research Associate. Brite will be involved in a number of research initiatives such as College Readiness, Response to Intervention and leading indicators associated with improved student outcomes.

Prior to joining Edvance Research, Brite worked at Harcourt Assessment, Inc. where she assisted in the development and publication of a variety of Early Childhood assessment products such as Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development—Third Edition, Bayley–III Screening Test, Bayley–III Motor Test, Greenspan Social Emotional Growth Chart, Ready to Learn, and Wechsler Fundamentals: Academic Skills. These developmental assessment products were tailored to identify the need for early intervention services and assist parents and service providers in planning intervention strategies for children, and included extensive studies on children with disabilities. Preceding her work on the development of assessment products, she worked at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). Her former work in research at UTSA included participation and assistance in the development of various research projects. Primary projects included survey research of the demography of San Antonio and the surrounding areas, a needs assessment of the lives of Kerr County residents, the UTSA Formula Funding project, and a feasibility study for the UTSA Department of Psychology’s Doctoral Program proposal. During her work at UTSA she designed questionnaires for survey research, developed survey instruments, examined the criteria and procedure for valid and reliable measures, conducted phone, mail, and personal interviews for survey research, and follow up research including additional survey interviews and on site visits. While working for UTSA, Brite served as a representative of the University in the San Antonio Metropolitan Health Project: Mobilizing Action through Planning and Partnerships. This project evaluated community health and planned for action that would ultimately lead to community health improvement. In addition to her test development and research experience, Brite served as an instructor for undergraduate Experimental Psychology where she taught students how to apply experimental design procedures to select problems in the collection of data and evaluation of Psychological theories.

Brite holds a bachelor of arts degree in Psychology and a master of science degree in Psychology from the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Back to top

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 

Ally Ibarra - Executive Assistant

Ally Ibarra joins Edvance Research as Executive Assistant to provide administrative support to the President, the research and development team, and Human Resources. In this capacity she schedules meetings, travel and departmental activities. In addition, she coordinates contract services. Ally has over 13 years of experience as an Executive Assistant, serving senior officers in large to medium size companies in the US and in Mexico and 4 years of Project Management for an International Import/Export firm in California. She studied Business Administration at Sacramento City College.

Back to top