Emily Daggett (she/her)

LIFE Fellow since 2026, University of Virginia

As a current graduate student of Developmental Psychology at the University of Virginia, my research draws insights from evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and the education sciences. Informed by these disciplines and my previous experiences as a Montessori student, teacher, and teacher educator, I investigate the conditions that support optimal cognitive, social-emotional, and cultural development in childhood. These influences have led me to explore the outcomes of evolutionarily aligned education (i.e., schooling that promotes children’s evolved learning mechanisms, such as observation, imitation, and multiage collaboration) and to offer Montessori as an example of an educational model better matched with how humans evolved to learn. Under the mentorship of Angeline Lillard, I have studied the impact of public Montessori on child outcomes, variations in fidelity of Montessori implementation, and teacher practices and beliefs. I am increasingly interested in the mechanisms that enable adults to create and sustain evolutionarily aligned learning conditions in schools and therefore my upcoming dissertation will investigate interpersonal and institutional influences on the development of Montessori teacher self-efficacy.

Publications

Lillard, A. S., Loeb, D., Berg, J., Escueta, M., Manship, K., Hauser, A., & Daggett, E. D. (2025). A national randomized controlled trial of the impact of public Montessori preschool at the end of kindergarten. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 122(43), Article e2506130122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2506130122