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Lauren Barton

Early Childhood Researcher

Lauren Barton, Ph.D., focuses on research and practice that support the development of effective and meaningful outcome measurement systems for infants and young children, including those with disabilities and other special needs. Through her involvement with the Early Childhood Outcomes (ECO) Center, Dr. Barton has engaged in nationwide discussions and decisionmaking regarding best-practice approaches for assessing outcomes in young children and their families. She also has provided technical assistance to and collaborated with state teams as they establish their vision, develop a design, begin implementation, analyze child and family outcomes data collected, and support ongoing evaluation and improvement of their outcome measurement systems so that they address both the unique needs within the state and needs for reporting data nationally. The Child Outcomes Summary Form (COSF) was developed by the ECO Center as an innovative approach to collect outcomes data that meets states’ needs for synthesizing multiple sources of information about young children’s functioning for accountability reporting purposes. Dr. Barton was involved in this development work and is coordinating a series of studies designed to investigate the psychometric characteristics and quality of COSF data for accountability purposes and state program improvement.

Dr. Barton also has conducted community-based, longitudinal, prevention, and intervention research studies that have examined outcomes for young children and their families. Her experience includes design, data collection, analysis, and reporting on research findings about children at health and environmental risk who were targeted for intervention. Dr. Barton has provided training and ongoing technical assistance with paraprofessionals and professionals working with young children in both home- and center-based settings. In this work, she has focused on implementing best practices to promote emergent literacy in Early Head Start; tracking maternal and child outcomes for ethnically diverse, low-income women and families; and advising project staff about qualitative and quantitative approaches to evaluate effective early childhood programs and to assess child health and development. In addition to her work at SRI, Dr. Barton’s experience includes work on the Maternal Caregivers Study, StoryQUEST Project, Grand Rapids Home Visiting Study, Flint Prematurity Study, and Michigan State University REACH Study. She has authored or coauthored papers and reports on language and literacy from birth to 3 years, changes in pre- and postnatal perceived stress, improving the health and development of low-income women, and perspectives on infant mental health.

Dr. Barton received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Michigan State University, with additional interdepartmental specializations in applied developmental science and infant studies. She also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in health psychology at the University of California, San Francisco.