Background
Jackie Caemmerer, PhD, is a licensed psychologist and nationally certified school psychologist and Assistant Professor in the school psychology program within the Department of Educational Psychology in the UConn Neag School of Education. Prior to her career at UConn, Caemmerer was an assistant professor at Howard University in Washington D.C.. Before her academic career, she worked in many different K-12 schools, and also worked in juvenile detention centers and in private practice. As a school psychologist, Caemmerer works with children who are struggling in school academically, socially, emotionally, and behaviorally and performs assessments in order to determine the areas in which a child may be struggling and to support the child appropriately.

Caemmerer has been interested in helping people since adolescence. “I’ve always wanted to help and support people, and I knew right away that I wanted to major in psychology,” she says. Her experiences working as a camp counselor and working at a center for children with learning disabilities as an undergraduate are what initially sparked her interest in working with children. Later while completing her master’s degree and working with professors on their research, she realized that she wanted to devote her career to working on child-related research in schools. “I see working with kids as taking a preventative avenue, because I am able to intervene while they’re young so that they can be successful later on in life,” says Caemmerer.

At UConn, Caemmerer works with both masters and doctoral students, teaching them how to give cognitive assessments, including a class on academic assessments (and providing information on how children learn reading, writing, math, and other related fields) and a class on educational measurement that focuses on thinking about assessments broadly. She teaches about foundational principles such as reliability, validity, how to make good measures, and how to evaluate what is considered a good assessment. Caemerrer has had the opportunity to mentor a few doctoral students, helping them to develop their research skills and involving them in her personal research team as well.

Caemmerer’s research involves evaluating the tests that school psychologists use most commonly with children and their outcomes. These tests are used on children of all different ages, races, and ethnicities, and her research helps to determine whether or not these assessments are accurate when measuring the same things on children from different backgrounds. Caemmerer does a lot of research involving data that has been collected from federal government agencies or testing company agencies.

Involvement with CSCH
Caemmerer was initially introduced to the Collaboratory through her work with Sandra Chafouleas, CSCH Co-director, in the school psychology program. Caemmerer’s focus on children and schools in both her teaching and research is a natural fit with CSCH and she values the whole child perspective that CSCH brings to research.

Caemmerer is currently working on a grant project with Dr. Chafouleas known as Project ESSY. Project ESSY is aimed towards creating an equitable screener to be used in schools in an attempt to comprehensively assess all the domains of child functioning. This includes assessing how the child is doing academically, socially, emotionally, behaviorally, as well as the things that are going on within their environments both at home and in school. The project is now in its second year, and Caemmerer is preparing to collect data. Caemmerer also works on other research projects with individuals both within and outside of UConn, focusing mainly on the relationship between children’s cognitive functioning and academic performance.

You can learn more about Caemmerer and her work through her UConn faculty page.

Fun Facts

Caemmerer is mother to a five-year-old and a one-year-old, as well as a dog and three cats. She enjoys spending her free time going on hikes and exploring different places in New England with her family.

Undergraduate Researcher Elena Roberts interviewed Jacqueline Caemmerer and wrote this profile.