As a Technical Assistance Expert for the SLDS State Support Team, Jeff Watson, Ph.D., supports states on various data topics, including governance issues, quality, use, and visualizations. As well, he works across states supporting research and evaluation, and stakeholder engagement. His focus is on building state capacity by ensuring that states’ data systems support agency and cross-agency priorities and goals.
Dr. Watson leverages 20 years of experience in the K20 decision support space, including serving as a researcher and technical assistance provider at UW-Madison on early rounds of SLDS and Teacher Incentive Funds (TIF). He also provided data systems expertise to the Bush Foundation’s Teacher Effectiveness Initiative, which sought to strengthen P20 data use around teacher preparation and teacher quality. Dr. Watson also served as a data systems expert for Wisconsin’s Educator Effectiveness Initiative. He has also served as Vice President of Education Research and Analytics at a major education solutions provider, where he guided product development to ensure the company’s products continued to support district and state infrastructure needs (including building out predictive analytic products) and client-side utilization and project success (e.g., adoption and use strategies, measures, and best practices).
Dr. Watson received his Ph.D. from UW-Madison in Industrial and Systems Engineering with a focus on Human Computer Interaction and Human Factors, where he applied an engineering theory to identify and understand factors that contributed to school-level capacity to use data to guide instructional decision making.
