Meet the authors

David Kidd is the Chief Assessment Scientist with the Design Studio at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics (ELSCE). The Design Studio is a hub that supports innovative ethics and civics learning initiatives, originating all across the university and affiliated with the ELSCE, that are dedicated to teaching people how to think through and work collectively on hard issues. Currently Dr. Kidd leads research studies with the Democratic Knowledge Project and the National Ethics Project. David received a PhD in Social Psychology from the New School for Social Research in 2015, where he was a postdoctoral fellow before coming to Harvard University in 2017.

Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, and Director of Harvard’s Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, is a political theorist who has published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought.

Allen is the founding director for the Democratic Knowledge Project Design Studio, which emerged from the Democratic Knowledge Project, a distributed research and action lab at Harvard University. Allen's lab, the Democratic Knowledge Project, worked to identify, strengthen, and disseminate the bodies of knowledge, skills, and capacities that democratic citizens need in order to succeed at operating their democracy. The Design Studio now supports the Democratic Knowledge Project K-12 civic education work, for which Allen is a faculty advisor.

Ariana Zetlin is a Research Program Analyst on the Design-based Implementation Research team of the Democratic Knowledge Project. She received an MA in Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2020, and she graduated with a combined MA in Teaching and BA in History from the University of Virginia in 2017. Her teaching experience in Virginia and Taiwan focused her research interest on the impact of standards and assessment policies on instructional practices.