Jessica Kilday

Jessica Kilday is a postdoctoral research associate for the Active Playful Learning project. In this program, elementary teachers are supported in math instruction that is active, engaged, and meaningful, collaborative, iterative, and joyful. Kilday is part of the evaluation team to understand teacher implementation and student outcomes.

Kilday’s research integrates perspectives from developmental and educational psychology. She is interested in how students and their social environment shape one another. She focuses on the development of youth’s peer relationships in school settings, with an emphasis on how teachers create engaging, supportive and prosocial classrooms. To study these dynamics, she tends to use quantitative methods that model youth’s embeddedness in classrooms and social networks.

Kilday’s work is informed by her prior experience as a Virginia middle school teacher. She also brings expertise from several field-based randomized control trials conducted in the Prosocial Education Lab at the University of Missouri. These interventions aimed to improve middle school teachers’ capacity to promote prosocial behavior.

Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2023
M.S., University of Michigan, 2019
M.S., George Mason University, 2013
B.A., University of Mary Washington, 2010