Notes on Contributors
Steve Graham is a Regents and the Warner Professor in the Division of Leadership and Innovation in Teachers College. He completed his Ed.D. at the University of Kansas. For 42 years he has studied how writing develops, how to teach it effectively, and how writing can be used to support reading and learning. His research involves typically developing writers and students with special needs in both elementary and secondary schools, with much of occurring in classrooms in urban schools.
Fien De Smedt is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Educational Studies (Ghent University). Her research mainly focusses on how to foster elementary and secondary school students’ writing skills and motivation.
Herb Turner holds a Ph.D. in Policy Research, Evaluation, and Measurement from PENN’s Graduate School of Education. He is Principal Scientist at Analytica, Inc. with expertise in leading and advising research teams conducting rigorous evaluations to identify what interventions work in education and related areas. A certified US Department of Education What Works Clearinghouse reviewer, Dr. Turner publishes in peer-reviewed journals and has written multiple methodological guidance documents on rigorous research to identify what works.
Kausalai (Kay) Wijekumar is the Houston Endowment Chair, EDGES Fellow, and Director of the Center for Urban School Partnerships at Texas A&M University. She dedicates her work to eradicate iliteracy across the world through the development and testing of web-based intelligent tutoring systems for reading comprehension and writing. She has recently re-purposed the web-based tools to deliver teacher professional development. Her work has received the strongest validation from the What Works Clearinghouse. She has conducted over 12 large scale randomized controlled trials to establish impact estimates about the interventions.
Puiwa Lei is Professor of Educational Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University. She is a renowned methodologist and psychometrician. She served as the methodologist for over 25 large scale studies designed to establish the impact estimates for multiple interventions in literacy, child development, and STEM learning.
Jean Bragg Schumaker holds a PhD and is an S.E.P. She is Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Special Education and Applied Behavioral Science at the University of Kansas. She is also President of Edge Enterprises, Inc., a research and publishing company focusing in the area of special education. She is a certified trauma therapist. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Kansas in Developmental and Child Psychology in 1976. She has spent the last 50 years studying the problems of adolescents and developing and validating educational interventions for them.
Karen Harris is Regents Professor Emeritus and Research Professor at Arizona State University. She completed her EdD at Auburn University in 1981. She has been involved in the field of Education for 50 years. She developed the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) instructional model. Her current research focuses on refinement of SRSD; practice-based professional development in SRSD for special and general educators; validating writing, and reading for writing, strategies in areas and grade levels not yet addressed; technology supported SRSD instruction; and integrating SRSD instruction with EBP s in handwriting, spelling, sentence construction, and vocabulary in the early grades.
April Camping is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Texas A&M University. Her PhD is in Learning, Literacies, and Technologies (Arizona State University ’21) and her research focuses on writing and literacy instruction for culturally and linguistically diverse students. This includes experimental research on writing motivation and achievement, teacher professional development and implementation of evidence-based practices, and meta-analyses/syntheses.
Debra McKeown is an Associate Professor of Literacy at Texas A&M University. She completed her PhD at Vanderbilt University. She studies evidence-based practices in literacy and effective professional development models to support widespread implementation and adoption of these practices. She works with teachers in inclusive classrooms serving a wide range of student needs in elementary and secondary settings, most often in urban settings.
Rebecca Jesson is an Associate Professor in literacy education at the Faculty of Education and Social Work. Rebecca’s research is situated in schools and their communities in New Zealand and the Pacific. Her focus is on designing, with teachers, innovations that improve the literacy learning experiences of students. Rebecca advocates for the value of literature and texts that represent Aotearoa New Zealand, and for the power of authorship in children’s literate lives.
Debra Myhill is Professor Emerita in Language and Literacy Education at the University of Exeter, where she completed her PhD in 1995. She is former Director of the Centre for Research in Writing. Her research interests focus principally on aspects of language and literacy teaching, particularly the teaching of writing.
Judy Parr is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Auckland. Her research focuses on literacy, particularly writing; much is collaborative work within major projects relating to school improvement.
Amy Gillespie Rouse is an Associate Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. She earned her Ph.D. in 2014 from Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on writing interventions for struggling writers and students with learning disabilities. She also develops and examines interventions to promote elementary-aged students’ use of writing to facilitate their learning of STEM concepts.
María Arrimada is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education at University of León. She defended her doctoral dissertation in 2020. Her research focuses on early writing instruction and prevention of writing disabilities through the Response to Intervention model. This includes both online and offline assessment of the written product and the writing process. She works in close collaboration with elementary schools, particularly teachers from 1st to 3rd grade. She has published various papers in educational and cognitive psychology journals.
Renske Bouwer is Assistant Professor in Language and Education at Utrecht University. She combines theories from educational sciences, psychology and linguistics to improve the writing skills of students in all educational levels. She also investigates the merits of comparative assessment methods for the formative and summative assessment of writing.
Elke Van Steendam is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Leuven. Her research focuses on language learning and instruction in general and writing research in specific. She specializes in three main research strands which are closely intertwined: the relation between the writing process and product and mediators and moderators defining that relationship both when writing individually and collaboratively, writing instruction and feedback, and writing assessment.
Marije Lesterhuis is Assistant Professor in Education at the UMC Utrecht. Her main interest is linking formal and informal learning, e.g., through the process of training transfer and assessment and feedback.
Nina Vandermeulen is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Umeå University. Her research mainly focuses on writing processes, feedback, and source-based writing.
Sharon Zumbrunn is an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology in the School of Education at Virginia Commonwealth University. She completed her PhD at the Unversity of Nebraska -- Lincoln. Her broad research interests address understanding student learning and motivation, and the contexts that foster student success. Her current projects include longitudinal, experimental, and mixed method investigations that examine the development of writing motivation and self-regulation across developmental levels (elementary through college).
Roger Bruning is Velma Warren Hodder Professor Emeritus in the College of Education and Human Sciences at the University of Nebraska--Lincoln. He completed his PhD at the University of Nebraska -- Lincoln. Across a 50-year career, he has focused his research on applying psychological principles to teaching and learning, with a particular emphasis on literacy development and motivation.
Anna Hall is an Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education at Clemson University. Her scholarship focuses on examining the writing attitudes of teachers and students and developing and adapting instructional writing strategies. She focuses on forming research partnerships within her community, as well as the educational community at large, to improve the writing lives of young children.
Qianyi Gao is a Research Scientist in the College of Education at the University of Iowa. She completed her PhD at Clemson University. Her research interests include creativity, play-based learning, arts integration and its impact on the the development of young children.
Kelley M. White is a Professor of Teacher Education and program director for Early Childhood Education at the College of Charleston. She completed her doctoral work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Early Childhood, Families and Literacy. Her research interests include teacher-child relationships and children’s literacy and social and emotional development. Prior to her work in higher education, she taught kindergarten in public school settings just outside of Washington, D.C.
Beth Beschorner is Full Professor and Department Chair within the Department of Elementary and Literacy Education at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Her research focuses on antiracism and innovation in elementary schools and in teacher preparation.
Huub van den Bergh is Full Professor in pedagogy measurement of language skils at the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University. His research focusses on methodology and statistics on the one hand and learning processes on the other.
Sven De Maeyer is Full Professor at the departement of Training and Education Sciences at the Unversity of Antwerp. His research focuses on the measurement of (learning) processes, (formative) assessment and rating in education (with an emphasis on the merits of comparative judgement) and mixed effects modeling. He often applies mixed effect models both in a frequentist and a bayesian framework.
Charles A. MacArthur is Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware. Major research interests include writing development and instruction, development of self-regulated strategies and motivation, and adult literacy. He has directed ten federally funded research projects on writing instruction, most recently a five-year project evaluating a curriculum for college developmental writing—Supporting Strategic Writers. He is co-editor of the Journal of Writing Research. He has published over 125 articles and book chapters and co-edited or written several books, including the Handbook of Writing Research, Best Practices in Writing Instruction, Adult Education Literacy Instruction: A Review of the Research, and Developing Strategic Writers through Genre Instruction. In 2020, he was named an AERA Fellow. In 2022, he received the Special Education Research Award from the Council for Exceptional Education (CEC), and the Jeannette Fleischner Career Leadership Award from the Division of Learning Disabilities.