Leadership Studies Professor Jackson Named President-Elect of AEA

EAST GREENSBORO, N.C. (Dec. 11, 2023) – Karen T. Jackson, Ph.D., assistant professor of leadership studies in the College of Education (COEd) at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State, has been named president-elect of the American Evaluation Association (AEA) for 2024-26.

The association’s mission is to improve evaluation practices and methods, advance the effective practices of evaluation use, promote evaluation as a profession, and support the contribution of evaluation to the generation of theory and knowledge about effective human action.

Jackson has been a member of AEA since 2013 and has served the organization in many capacities including board member at large (2020-2023). She has promoted AEA’s organizational role as educator of evaluators, policy informant and advocate for justice..

As president-elect, Jackson will dedicate herself to development and implementation of the strategic plan for  the professional association.

“The president-elect position provides opportunity to impact the association as well as the field of evaluation,” she said. “I hope to support and promote leadership development within the organization and influence methods used in the field to represent individuals and groups from diverse communities.”

AEA has more than 5,000 members representing all 50 states in the United States as well as more than 80 foreign countries. Its members include students studying evaluation, evaluators engaged in assessment of higher education and pre-k12, independent consultants, data visualization experts, evaluation educators, evaluation managers and professionals with a focus in nonprofits and foundations.

Jackson joined N.C. A&T in 2016 and was appointed to the rank of assistant professor on the tenure track in 2018. She has served on the university’s faculty senate and education policy committees since 2020 and Community Engagement Council since 2021, and is a member of the Leadership and Research team for LEAP (lifetime healthy eating and activity practices). She has served on the Faculty Advisory Council since 2020 and previously served as co-leader of the dissertation handbook taskforce for COEd. In the Department of Leadership Studies and Adult Education, she has served since 2018 as chair of the curriculum committee and since 2020 as a member of both the admissions and assessment committees, previously serving a co-chair of the latter.

Jackson’s work in the role of senior personnel educational researcher with the ADVANCE Social Behavioral Sciences (SBS) team, with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), has led to four publications and three conference presentations.

Also, with NSF funding, Jackson has been the educational researcher on the Broadening Participation in Research team. In this role, she participated in writing the grant to acquire the funding by writing the research questions, framing the initial science capital survey that is the focus of the work and writing the scope of work in collaboration with the lead principal investigator. Since acquiring the grant, she has led the team by helping to manage the project once the initial lead principal investigator retired, scoping out our goals for each semester, leading workshops on topic in educational research, and leading the writing and submission of the annual report.

In October 2022, Jackson received a Department of Justice grant for Community Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiatives. Team partners for this research practitioner partnership grant are the City of Greensboro-Greensboro Police Department and University of North Carolina-Greensboro. Jackson leads the research team for this grant at A&T and has employed two graduate research assistants to help her work on research, community engagement and drafting manuscripts for publication.

Jackson holds a B.S. in chemistry and an M.Ed. in mathematics and curriculum and instruction, both from The University of Southern Mississippi, and Ph.D. in educational research and policy analysis from North Carolina State University.