Margaret Burchinal

Burchinal obtained her PhD in Quantitative Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1986. Her dissertation, titled Methods for Estimating Individual Developmental Functions was conducted under the supervision of Mark Appelbaum. This study developed growth curve statistical models to estimate individual differences in speech development in longitudinal research designs.

Burchinal graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelor's in Psychology from Iowa State University in 1976. She subsequently attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in which she graduated with a master's degree in Special Education in 1978. Her masters thesis was titled The Contingent Relationship of Mother and Infant Behaviors in Dyadic Interactions.

Burchinal's research program has investigated the impact of high quality of childhood education on children's language and cognitive development. She served as an investigator on the Abecedarian Early Intervention Project, a controlled experiment that established the benefits of early childhood education for children growing up in poverty. This study enrolled over 100 predominantly African-American children born to low income families between 1972 and 1977. Infants were randomly assigned an early education group, which received an educational intervention in a childcare setting up to age five years, or to a control group. The educational intervention used games to encourage social, emotional, and cognitive areas of development with an emphasis on language skills. Follow up studies on the children's progress at ages 12, 15, 21, and 30 years indicated long lasting benefits of early childhood education.

Margaret R. Burchinal (born June 16, 1951 in Columbus, Ohio) is a quantitative psychologist and statistician known for her research on child care. She is Senior Research Scientist and Director of the Data Management and Analysis Center of the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.