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About
Pronouns: Her, She, Herself
Ciara C. Knight's expertise lies within and between evaluation, research, and teaching. She has a natural ability to explain abstract concepts while addressing questions in an engaging, inclusive, exciting, and thought-provoking manner across diverse audiences and settings. As a practitioner, Ciara has extensive professional experience evaluating health and higher education programs focused on communities of varying cultural backgrounds and needs. Her evaluation practice is often supported by her research pursuits focusing on diverse communities, equity, data visualization, and contextual (i.e., cultural, organizational, environmental, and political) factors in evaluation, higher education, and health disparities. With combined expertise in research and evaluation, Ciara provides her students with relatable and field-based examples of how contextual factors and social science theories (i.e., psychological, health, evaluation) play a role in personal and professional domains. Ultimately, Ciara balances her evaluation and research commitments with her third passion - sparking curiosity and interest through her teaching.
Evaluation
In all, Ciara has an abundance of experience with programs with underlying goals of either increasing the pool of qualified undergraduate minority candidates in research-based graduate programs or training faculty to change their pedagogy to better educate a diverse student body or community based programs designed to empower individuals to improve their health outcomes. See more here.
Research
Ciara’s research has focused on the application of socio-behavioral theories to racial/ethnic and culturally diverse programs, evaluation, and applied settings. Her doctorate thesis focused on how stereotype threat could operate in evaluation environments and negatively impact evaluation practice. Findings provided insight for future research on the nature of how evaluators are trained. See more here.
Teaching
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s (1947) captured the ultimate purpose of education along with what students desire from their education when he said, “Intelligence plus character--that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate.” See more here.