Dr. Bertha Gorham joined the School of Education at American International College in 2020, where she has taught Individualized Research Design, Research Methods, and Teaching in a Diverse Society. She brings over 30 years of experience in educational research and evaluation, having served as a researcher for the Maryland State Department of Education. Appointed to the Superintendent’s Committee to develop statewide school report cards, she served as Executive Secretary to the Council of Statewide Planning of Educational Information System. For five years, she was Maryland’s representative to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Forum on Educational Statistics, published annual teacher supply and demand reports for the Maryland state legislature, and served on the superintendent’s diversity in education committee. Dr. Gorham was formerly employed at the Education Development Center in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she evaluated two large federally funded projects to address the opioid addiction problem and infant and early childhood mental health. For ten years, she was a senior researcher in the Center for Research in Education at RTI International, where she led multiple national studies on safe and drug-free schools, teacher preparation, and early childhood development and designed educational information systems for three states.

Education:

Ph.D. Education Leadership and Policy Analysis, North Carolina State University

M.S. Educational Measurement Research and Statistics, Johns Hopkins University

B.A. Business, College of Notre Dame of Maryland

Awards:

American Educational Research Association/Spencer Foundation’s Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.

Awarded top honor for her research on making schools work for children by the College of Education and Psychology at North Carolina State University.

Research:

 Analysis of teachers’ participation in an action research field-based graduate program. A paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association: Division K-Teaching and Teacher Education. San Francisco, CA.

Contextual Factors Being Measured by Ethnographic Techniques. A poster presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research on Child Development, Tampa, FL

Changing Schools for Children: A school-university partnership. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA.

Teaching Areas

Educational Research Methods

Diversity in Education Classrooms

Educational Research Design

Program Evaluation Methods