Dr. Maria Cristina "Cricket" Limlingan
From 2018 – 2023 she was Research Scientist at Cultivate Learning at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she was the lead researcher for the Washington State for the Partnerships for Pre-K Improvement Project, a multi-year, cross-sectoral study focusing on improving the quality of state-funded pre-k programs funded by the Gates Foundation. She was also a part of the Head Start National Center on Early Childhood Development, Teaching, and Learning working on revising the Multicultural Principles. In 2021, she was selected to be part of the University of Washington Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities Trainee and the William T. Grant Advanced Quantitative and Computational Scholar.
From 2016 - 2018 she was Postdoctoral Fellow in Classroom Intervention for the Developing Language and Literacy Lab, Teachers College, Columbia University in New York where she worked on research related to supporting teachers who work with dual language learners (DLLs). During this time, she was also selected as a Bridging the Word Gap Emerging Research Scholar.
From 2011 – 2015 during her doctoral studies at Tufts University, Maria Cristina was the primary doctoral research assistants for Readiness for Integrated Science and Engineering (RISE) project, a National Science Foundation funded project where she led a team of 15 undergraduate and graduate research assistants in both quantitative (child assessments, classroom observations and teacher survey data) and qualitative (classroom participant observations, teacher interviews) data collection efforts for three years. Home-school collaborations are a central element of RISE and Cricket facilitated meetings with teachers and parents for two years with the goal of learning and building on families’ assets and strengths as part of these efforts. Maria Cristina also completed internships with the Education Development Center, working on Basa Pilipinas Project (Read Philippines), Abt Associates developing a research brief for the National Center on Hispanic Children and Families on integrated data systems and Yale University where she co-author a manual for Unicef on School Readiness and Transitions: A Companion to the Child Friendly Schools.
From 2008 – 2010, Cricket also worked as a research analyst for the Herr Research Center for Children and Social Policy at the Erikson Institute where she lead qualitative data collection activities for programs serving children birth to three years for the Illinois Birth to Five Evaluation. She was also a research assistant, collecting data for organizations such as the Health, Emotion and Behavior Lab at Yale University, and the National Institute for Early Education at Rutgers University
Cricket received her master’s in educational policy from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007 and a Ph.D. in Child Development from Tufts University in 2016. Her dissertation, which was awarded a Head Start Student Research Scholar dissertation grant, examined the relations between teacher-child interactions, classroom context and Latino dual language learners’ (DLLs) school readiness using a multi-method design that consisted of secondary data analysis and collecting primary quantitative and qualitative data.