by Marilyn Jager Adams, Ph.D., Barbara R. Foorman, Ph.D., Ingvar Lundberg, Ph.D., & Terri Beeler, Ed.D.

Copyright © 1998 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved.

Marilyn Jager Adams, Ph.D., a visiting scholar at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, received her Ph.D. in cognitive and developmental psychology from Brown University in 1975 and has been working on issues of education and cognition ever since. In 1995, she was presented with the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Sylvia Scribner Award for Outstanding Contribution to Education through Research.

In addition to a number of chapter and journal articles, Dr. Adams is the author of the landmark synthesis of research on reading and its acquisition, Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print (MIT Press, 1990). She is also the principal author of several classroom resources, including the kindergarten and primary levels of Collections for Young Scholars (SRA/McGraw-Hill, 1995) and Odyssey: A Curriculum for Thinking (Charlesbridge, 1986), and experimentally validated program on thinking skills that was originally developed for Venezuelan barrio students.

Dr. Adams was Vice President (1995-1997) of AERA and a member of the Study Committee for the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, the College Boards’ Advisory Committee for Research and Development, and the planning committee for the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress in Reading. She is a member of the national advisory boards for the Consortium on Reading Excellence (CORE), the Orton/International Dyslexia Society, the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, and the Neuhaus Education Center. She is on the Literacy Advisory Board for Sesame Street and Between the Lions, a forthcoming television show on reading for 4- to 7-year-olds, and has also worked on early literacy products with a number of educational software groups including Apt Productions, Breakthrough, Cast, Disney Interactive, Microsoft, Sunburst/Software for Success, 7th Level, and The Waterford Institute.

Barbara R. Foorman, Ph.D., earned her doctorate at the University of California-Berkeley. She is Professor of Pediatrics and Director of the Center for Academic and Reading Skills at the University of Texas-Houston Medical School and Principal Investigator of the grant funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), "Early Interventions for Children with Reading Problems." In addition to many chapters and journal articles on topics related to language and reading development, she is the editor of Reading Acquisition: Cultural Constraints and Cognitive Universals (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986). She is on the editorial board of Journal of Learning Disabilities and has guest edited special issues of Scientific Studies of Reading, Linguistics and Education and Journal of Learning Disabilities. Dr. Foorman has been actively involved in outreach to the schools and to the general public, having chaired Houston Independent School District's Committee on a Balanced Approach to Reading and having testified before the California and Texas legislatures and the Texas State Board of Education Long-Range Planning Committee. Dr. Foorman is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, the board of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, the Consortium on Reading Excellence (CORE), and several local reading efforts.

Ingvar Lundberg, Ph.D., was first trained as a school teacher and served in inner-city schools in Stockholm, Sweden. Later, he entered an academic career and became Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Ume. He has published a dozen books, primarily in Scandinavian languages and a large number of scientific articled, particularly in the field of reading and language development. He served on the steering committee of the largest survey of reading achievement in the world, including more than 30 countries. He is a fellow of several academies and learned societies and serves on the editorial board of a number of scientific journals. He is currently affiliated with the Department of Psychology at Göteborg University, Göteborg, Sweden, where he directs a research program on communication disabilities.

Terri Beeler, Ed.D., has more than 20 years of experience in education, in both teaching and administration. Dr. Beeler is Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Education at the University of Houston's downtown campus. Within the responsibilities of that position, she is one of the coordinators of a totally field-based teacher education program, which allows her to work with both preservice and in-service teachers and also continue to be in classrooms with children. In addition, she does a great deal of staff development and consultant work in the area of early literacy development, specifically phonemic awareness and guided reading. She is also a co-editor of the State of Reading, the journal of the Texas State Reading Association, and author of I Can Read, I Can Write: Creating a Print-Rich Environment (Creative Teaching Press, 1993).