Thursday, January 24, 2008
Adolescent Literacy - February 19-20, 2008
Deborah Reed, a former high school teacher, is a research associate with the Vaughn Gross Center for Reading and Language Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. She currently serves as the Principal Investigator and Project Manager for the Texas Adolescent Literacy Academies, a statewide initiative to train middle school teachers in a 3-tier approach to reading instruction and intervention. Prior to joining the Vaughn Gross Center, she was a program associate with the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory where she participated in a federal research study of systemic improvement in the area of reading. Deborah’s publications have appeared in Learning Disability Research and Practice, Middle School Journal, Multiple Voices for Ethnically Diverse Exceptional Learners, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and Journal of Staff Development. She has also served on the Adolescent Literacy Working Group hosted by the Center on Instruction, Reading Strand.
Helen S. Apthorp, Ph.D., Principal Researcher, McREL, has extensive knowledge of reading and language development and education research. She holds a doctorate in Special Education from the University of Connecticut and a master’s degree in Educational Psychology from the University of Colorado. In 1998, she moved to Colorado with her husband and two sons and joined McREL as a Researcher. Dr. Apthorp’s research and evaluation experience includes studies in the areas of language and communication, school effectiveness, and reading instruction. Recently completed studies involved efficacy trials of three interventions; one focusing on phonics/phonemic awareness, another on oral reading fluency, and the third on vocabulary development. In addition, Dr. Apthorp co-directed McREL’s study of schools beating-the-odds, a non-experimental comparative study funded by McREL’s Regional Educational Laboratory contract with Institute of Education Sciences. Her research has appeared in refereed journals, such as, Review of Education Research, Journal of Learning Disabilities, Journal of Educational Research, and Developmental Psychology.