Judith Alamprese is a director at COSMOS Corporation in Bethesda, Maryland, where she is responsible for initiatives in adult education, policy analysis, and job training. She has led numerous research and evaluation projects in the fields of adult literacy and basic skills program effectiveness, workplace literacy, interagency coordination, and state assessment systems. Her early work in adult education includes the development of the National External Diploma Program, the first competency-based, applied-performance high school diploma for adults. She was also a member of the research team at the Family Development Research Center, one of the early family intervention programs for at-risk families.
The topic of interagency collaboration has been an ongoing focus of Ms. Alamprese's research, which has included studies of community task forces created as part of the Project Literacy U.S. media campaign and of state and local coordination of adult education funding and services. Currently, Ms. Alamprese is assessing the outcomes from the interagency staff development projects funded by the National Institute for Literacy, and is evaluating the operation of education and business partnerships funded by the National Workplace Literacy Program. She also is studying the development of state infrastructures for family literacy in collaboration with the National Center for Family Literacy. Ms. Alamprese's recent publications include reports on the implementation of the National Literacy Issues Forums in adult basic education programs, and the development of client satisfactory progress standards for Connecticut's welfare reform program.
Richard Durán is Professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1977, specializing in the areas of quantitative and cognitive psychology. He worked as a Research Scientist at Educational Testing Service from 1977-1984 prior to joining the U.C.-Santa Barbara faculty.
Dr. Durán conducts research on literary acquisition of language minority children and families. His research in these areas is sponsored by the Center for Research on Education of Students Placed At Risk, the National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning, and the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing. He edited a special issue of the journal Discourse Processes (January-February 1995) on the topic of literacy among Hispanics. His recent publications include Verbal Comprehension and Reasoning Skills of Latino Students, and Cooperative Learning Interaction and Construction of Activity.
Vivian L. Gadsden is Co-Director of the National Center on Fathers and Families, and is an Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1990 she has served as Associate Director of the National Center on Adult Literacy at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Gadsden's research focuses on family development and literacy across the life-span and examines issues of race, gender, culture, and poverty within the context of intergenerational learning. Among her current research projects are a multigenerational study of family development and literacy within 25 African American families (funded by the Spencer Foundation and the National Academy of Education) and a parent-child Head Start project (supported by the National Center on Adult Literacy). Her recent work appears in Teachers College Record, Urban Education, and Theory Into Practice. Co-editor (with Daniel Wagner) of Literacy Among African American Youth (Hampton Press), Dr. Gadsden is completing a booklength volume entitled Passages in Time, based on her multigenerational study.
Beth Harry entered the field of special education as a parent of a child with cerebral palsy. She is now Associate Professor of Special Education at the University of Miami, Florida, and her particular interest is in families and cultural issues. Dr. Harry's research and teaching focus on the impact of culture and social status on the needs and perspectives of families of children with disabilities, and on professionals' interactions with such families. Dr. Harry uses ethnographic research methods to investigate these issues, with particular regard to African American and Hispanic parents. She is the author of Cultural Diversity, Families and the Special Education System, a study of Puerto Rican parents' perspectives, and of several articles published in leading educational journals.
Andrew Hayes teaches education administration and instructional design and evaluation at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He has his doctorate in educational administration from the University of Georgia, and his master's degree from Louisiana Polytechnic University in the same field. At the University of North Carolina, Dr. Hayes coordinated planning for the master's degree programs in educational leadership, and coordinated planning for a proposed doctoral program in educational leadership. Dr. Hayes served as Principal Investigator of the William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust Family Literacy Project Evaluation for the National Center for Family Literacy. He also assisted the Governor's Office of Children and Youth of Hawaii in adoption of family literacy as a state strategy. Dr. Hayes has published over 50 project reports, monographs, articles, and conference presentations on topics such as institutes for delinquents, assessment and change of school climate, planning and evaluation, research methods, decision-making processes, instructional design, and family literacy. He is a member of the American Educational Research Association, American Evaluation Association, Eastern Educational Research Association, North Carolina Association for School Administrators, and Southern Regional Council on Educational Administration.
Jean Layzer is a Senior Associate at Abt Associates Inc. For the past 20 years she has studied programs and policies that promote the welfare of young children and their families. Most recently, she directed a national study of early childhood programs for disadvantaged preschoolers and an evaluation of Project Giant Step, an innovative program for four-year-olds and their families in New York City. She currently directs a national study of family support programs and is involved in studies of Head Start health services, Head Start Family Service Centers, and the Comprehensive Child Development Program.
Larry Mikulecky is Professor of Education and chair of the Language Education Department at Indiana University at Bloomington. He received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin and a master's degree from John Carroll University. Mikulecky is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and has been awarded Indiana University's Gorman teaching award as well as its highest teaching award, the Frederic Bachman Lieber Distinguished Teaching award. He is also recipient of Laubach of Canada's Distinguished Service Award and the state of Indiana's Community Service Award for literacy work.
Dr. Mikulecky's research examines the literacy requirements for success in business, the military, universities, and secondary schools. His most recent research has examined assessment issues in adult literacy programs, workplace literacy programs, and family literacy programs. He has served as principal investigator on over 20 research projects funded by the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor as well as those supported by foundation and corporate sponsorship. Dr. Mikulecky has published more than 100 journal articles, textbook chapters, and textbooks. He is lead author on the recent Simon & Schuster series Strategic Skill Builders for Banking, as well as the basic skills series On the Job, published by Cambridge Publications. He has also been Project Director for nearly a dozen Computer Assisted Instruction study skills programs designed for college students with funding from the federal government and corporate sponsors. He is currently directing the National Center on Adult Literacy's Workplace Literacy Impact Evaluation studies.
Douglas Powell is Professor and Head of the Department of Child Development and Family Studies at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. His primary areas of research interest are early childhood and parent educational support programs, and families as learning environments. Currently he directs a research and demonstration project focused on parents' use of inquiry and connections with nonfamilial institutions as strategies for facilitating children's learning. He is a former Editor of the Early Childhood Research Quarterly and member of National Education Goals Panel technical resource groups for goals focused on school readiness and school-family partnerships. He is past chair of the Early Education and Child Development Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. One of his recent publications is Enabling Young Children to Succeed in School (AERA, 1995).
Catherine Snow received her Ph.D. in psychology from McGill University in 1971, after which she worked for several years in the linguistics department of the University of Amsterdam. Her early research focused on the features of children's social and linguistic environments that facilitated language development; cross-cultural differences in mother-child interaction; and factors affecting second language acquisition. Since moving to the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1978, she has done research on the factors affecting the acquisition of literacy (co-authoring Unfulfilled Expectations: Home and School Influences on Literacy with W. Barnes, J. Chandler, I. Goodman, and L. Hemphill), and on the relationships between aspects of oral language development and later literary achievement, in the Home School Study of Language and Literacy Development. She has also pursued these topics in work with multilingual children, including 150 second-through fifth-graders at the United Nations International School and both elementary and middle school children in bilingual programs in New Haven, Connecticut.
Dr. Snow has written about language policy issues in the United States and in developing nations, and was co-editor with Courtney Cazden of English Plus: Issues in Bilingual Planning in Preschool Education, a report to UNICEF. She serves on the National Research Council Panel to establish a research agenda for Limited English Proficient and Bilingual Children. Currently, she is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education in the Department of Human Development and Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Robert St. Pierre is a Vice President at Abt Associates Inc., where for the last 20 years he has been principal investigator for educational research, evaluation, and policy analysis projects spanning diverse areas such as family literacy, family support, child development, compensatory education, curricular interventions, school health education, and child nutrition. He has published widely in evaluation and educational research journals, and is active in the American Evaluation Association. He currently directs national evaluations of the Even Start Family Literacy Program and the Comprehensive Child Development Program.
Dorothy Strickland is the State of New Jersey Professor of Reading. She was formerly the Arthur I. Gates Professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She has also served on the faculties of Kean College of New Jersey and Jersey State College. She taught in the New Jersey public schools for 11 years, six as a classroom teacher and five as a reading consultant and learning disabilities specialist.
Dr. Strickland has her M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University. She received her B.S. at Newark State College. She has authored more than 100 publications. Her books include Language, Literacy and the Child; Emerging Literacy: Young Children Learn to Read and Write; Educating Black Children: America's Challenge; and Families: An Anthology of Poetry for Young Children. She has also held elective office in both the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association, where she is past President. She serves on numerous state and national advisory boards.
Dr. Strickland is the recipient of a National Council of Teachers of English award for research, the Rewey Bell Inglis award as Outstanding Woman in English Education, and the International Reading Association's Outstanding Teacher Educator of Reading award. She has been presented with an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Bank Street College.
Patton Tabors is a Research Associate in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Prior to completing her doctoral degree at Harvard in 1987, Dr. Tabors taught fifth and sixth grades in a variety of inner city settings. She is presently the coordinator for the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development, a longitudinal study of the social precursors to literary achievement in children from low-income families. Recent responsibilities have also included directing the Book Reading Project, an embedded observational study of the New Chance and JOBS evaluations for the Manpower Development Research Corporation, which involved assessing the book reading behaviors of over 600 welfare-recipient mothers and their young children.
Dr. Tabors' research interests include first- and second-language acquisition, and the connections between language and literacy development, particularly in low-income populations. She has co-authored a variety of presentations and articles concerning findings from the Home-School Study and the Book Reading Project with Catherine Snow, David Dickinson, and graduate students who have completed thesis work on these data. She is presently writing Nobody, Yesbody: A Handbook for Early Childhood Educators of Children Learning English as a Second Language
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