Dr. Jennifer Frank

Jennifer L. Frank, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies (EPLS) at the University of Victoria. She earned her BA (Psychology), BSW (Social Work-Developmental Disabilities), MS (School Psychology), and PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. After working as a Research Associate at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Peabody College in Nashville TN, she completed an Institute for Education Sciences (IES) postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oregon focusing on applying advanced experimental and statistical methods to estimate the impact of schoolwide practices on individual student learning and behavior.  Dr. Frank's  present research sits at the intersection of inclusive education, school-based prevention, contemplative practices, and technology-supported interventions. Her work has been funded by several public and private foundations including the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Institute for Education Sciences (IES), National Institute on Mental Health (NIMH), National Institute on Child Health and Development (NICHD), Give Back Yoga Foundation, Mind and Life Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD). She served on the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine consensus panel to help develop a national agenda for children’s mental, emotional, and behavioural development in the United States, and regularly reviews for a variety of federal agencies and scholarly outlets. Her research has helped strengthen widely used school-based prevention programs, including Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), Communities That Care (CTC), Transformative Life Skills (TLS), Learning to Breathe (L2B), Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), and Project RESPECT. She is presently concluding a 5-year multi-site randomized trial examining the efficacy of Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education (CARE), a mindfulness-based program for teachers, on the well-being and classroom performance of Inclusive Educators in the Southern United States. Outside of this work, Dr. Frank is actively exploring the role of ethical entrepreneurship in education, open-education resource (OER) curation through headerless authoring technologies, and the use of  AI to create virtual role-play simulations to support teacher mastery of standardized protocols, non-violent communication, and crisis response strategies. The goal of Dr. Frank's work is to transform rigorous research into inclusive, sustainable, accessible, and deeply human educational experiences.

See Dr. Frank’s ORCID for a current list of publications. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0483-1472

ED-D420 - Learning Support: Context and Key Issues

ED-D515 - Advanced Assessment in Special Education