Stephanie Curenton

Stephanie M. Curenton, Ph.D. is a tenured associate professor in the Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. Her research focuses on positive child growth and development and dismantling health and education inequities for racially marginalized children and families. Stephanie studies the social, cognitive, and language development of children within various ecological contexts, such as parent-child interactions, early childhood education programs, early childhood workforce programs, and related state and federal policies.  Her topical areas of expertise are language and literacy development, particularly among African American children and dual language learners, and measurement development.  She has created two measures, the Conversation Compass Communication Screener-Revised a measure of children’s classroom conversation skills, and the Assessing Classroom Sociocultural Equity Scale, a measure of classroom quality for racially marginalized students. She has authored numerous empirical manuscripts as well as books and edited volumes targeted toward practitioners or policymakers.

She is a leader in the field of early childhood policy and child development.  She has served as past associate editor for the two top journals in early childhood, Early Childhood Research Quarterly and Early Education and Development. She has also been awarded two research policy fellowships, one from the Society for Research on Child Development (SRCD)/American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) where she worked in Office of Child Care and the other from National Child Development Institute (NBCDI). She has served on education non-profit boards for National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and local Head Start programs. 

Her research has been funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the Office of Program Research and Evaluation (OPRE), the National Academy of Science Ford Predoctoral Fellowship, American Education Research Association (AERA), Foundation for Child Development, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.  She earned her Ph.D. in Developmental and Community Psychology from the University of Virginia.

In her free time, Stephanie enjoys yoga, reading, spending time with her family, and playing with her new dog.