We're professors, doctoral students, research managers, undergraduate and master's research assistants, and coders. We come from several institutions, bringing together multiple forms of expertise in research design, reading theories, managing large-scale research projects, and digital coding.
Dr. Goodwin is an expert in the field of morphology. That means she studies how students use units of meaning like root words, suffixes, and prefixes to build word knowledge that then supports literacy endeavors. Dr. Goodwin’s interest in morphology stems from her prior experiences as an elementary and middle school teacher. When working with students, she noticed that they tended to skip words even when they had the knowledge to figure those words out. Skipping words impacted their comprehension, so she set out to figure out how to give students the tools to figure words out. Dr. Goodwin has published over 20 articles in research and teacher journals. She hopes this assessment tool makes it so that researchers and teachers can accurately link instruction to student strengths and weaknesses.
Dr. Petscher is the Director of Research at the Florida Center for Reading Research and a Research Associate at Florida State University. He is an expert in item response theory and psychometrics. He has over 100 publications in journals like the Journal of Educational Measurement and Journal of Educational Psychology and has led teams in developing 4 large scale computer adaptive tests of reading and language skills. Together, these assessments are used by over 1 million K-12 students yearly in multiple states and several countries. Dr. Petscher led the analysis work for Monster, PI.
Dan Reynolds taught high school English for seven years in Louisiana and Texas and received his PhD at VU in the Language, Literacy, and Culture track. He is interested in supporting students’ access to the challenging vocabulary and morphology that are the backbone of complex texts. He enjoys working with in-service teachers as well as developing education coursework to prepare the next generation of teachers.
Tess is currently a fifth-year PhD student at VU in the Language, Literacy, and Culture track, finishing up a dissertation looking at the role of practice in literacy teacher education. She is excited to be a part of this project because it offers teachers a fun way to collect data about students' academic language. Prior to starting her work at Vanderbilt, she taught English in the Bay Area, with a focus on developing rigorous and age appropriate supports for struggling readers. In the fall of 2019, she is joining Valor Collegiate Academies as the Director of Secondary Literacy.
Sara is a Doctoral student in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University. She is specializing in Language, Literacy, and Culture and is interested in teaching practices that best serve and support students that have historically been marginalized in Literacy classrooms. Prior to her doctoral studies, Sara taught middle school Literacy (4th-6th grades) for 8 years in Washington, D.C.
After teaching English as a Second Language for ten years, Sara moved into healthcare quality improvement research several years ago, and then into education research. As a former teacher, she enjoys working to better understand how students learn new words and how we can use what we learn about student’s language skills and morphological awareness to better support teachers in their goal to improve students’ literacy. She’s greatly enjoyed working with the wonderful teachers and students in our Nashville middle schools.