Alison L. Bailey is Professor of Human Development and Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. A graduate of Harvard University, Dr. Bailey is a developmental psycholinguist working on issues germane to children’s linguistic, social, and educational development. Her areas of research include first and second language acquisition, early literacy development, and academic language pedagogy and assessment practices with school-age English learners. She has published widely in these areas, most recently in Teachers College Record, Educational Researcher, Journal of Mathematical Behavior Review of Research in Education, Language Testing, Language Assessment Quarterly, TESOL Quarterly, Educational Policy and First Language and a commissioned paper for the Stanford Understanding Language Initiative. She has authored commercial assessments of early language and literacy development as well as analytical tools for language and literacy characterization. Dr. Bailey is currently the Principal Investigator of the Dynamic Language Learning Progressions project funded by the multi-state ASSETS Consortium (U.S. Dept. of Education Enhanced Assessment Grant) and the Wisconsin Center for Education Research to create an empirical base for English language summative and formative assessment.
Her books include The Language Demands of School: Putting academic English to the test (Yale University Press), Formative Assessment for Literacy, Grades K-6 (Sage/Corwin) with Margaret Heritage, and Spanish-language Narration and Literacy: Culture, cognition, and emotion (Cambridge University Press) with Allyssa McCabe and Gigliana Melzi. Her most recent book is Children’s Multilingual Development and Education: Fostering linguistic resources in home and school contexts with former student Anna Osipova (Cambridge University Press).
Dr. Bailey is a Faculty Research Partner at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST). She serves on the advisory boards of a number of states, organizations, and consortia developing next generation English language assessments including the English Language Proficiency Assessments for California (ELPAC) Technical Advisory Group (formerly CELDT) of the California Department of Education, and is a member of the NAEP Standing Committee on Reading and the National Council on Measurement in Education President’s Task Force on Classroom Assessment. More information can be found on Dr. Bailey’s SE&IS faculty page.