In this episode, Dr. Elena Forzani talks to us about reading as meaning making, multiple modes of communication, and literacy assessment. Dr. Forzani is known for her work centering on using multiple and mixed methods to understand and support digital literacies practices across the elementary and secondary levels. In particular, her work investigates the cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational dimensions of online reading, and especially how readers evaluate the credibility of online information. Elena Forzani is an assistant professor in Literacy Education at Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.
To cite this episode: Persohn, L. (Host). (2023, Nov 14). A conversation with Elena E. Forzani (Season 4, No. 5) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/0140-D0AD-2E0C-666F-42D2-L
Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
In this episode, Dr. Elena Forzani talks to us about reading as meaning making, multiple modes of communication, and literacy assessment. Dr. Forzani is known for her work centering on using multiple and mixed methods to understand and support digital literacies practices across the elementary and secondary levels. In particular, her work investigates the cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational dimensions of online reading, and especially how readers evaluate the credibility of online information. Elena Forzani is an assistant professor in Literacy Education at Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.
To cite this episode: Persohn, L. (Host). (2023, Nov 14). A conversation with Elena E. Forzani (Season 4, No. 5) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/0140-D0AD-2E0C-666F-42D2-L
Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Education Research has a problem the work of brilliant education researchers often doesn't reach the practice of brilliant teachers. Classroom Caffeine is here to help. In each episode, I talk with a top education researcher or expert educator about what they have learned from their research and experiences. In this episode, Dr Elena Forzani talks to us about reading as meaning making multiple modes of communication and literacy assessment. Dr Forzani is known for her work centering on using multiple and mixed methods to understand and support digital literacy's practices across the elementary and secondary levels. In particular, her work investigates the cognitive, metacognitive and motivational dimensions of online reading, and especially how readers evaluate the credibility of online information. Elena Forzani is an assistant professor in literacy education at Boston University's Wheelock College of Education and Human Development. For more information about our guest, stay tuned to the end of this episode. So pour a cup of your favorite drink and join me, your host, Lindsay Persohn, for Classroom Caffeine Research to Energize your Teaching Practice. Elena, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show.
Elena Forzani:Thanks so much for having me, Lindsay. It's great to be here.
Lindsay Persohn:So, from your own experiences in education, will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking now?
Elena Forzani:Sure, I was thinking about this a little bit and I think one of the things that comes back to me a lot well, I taught first grade and then I also taught high school, so I have a range of kids in my mind, but I often think about my ninth graders when I taught Romeo and Juliet, which I know is, you know, a classic text. Certainly lots of things not good about teaching that text, but there, I think, are some useful things for us and my students loved doing that text and we use some modern translations and looked at language a lot. But some of them, especially my students who were often like the least engaged in classes in general, were really engaged in that text and they would even come in, like during their lunch break, into my room and they would act out scenes. So we acted out scenes and class together as well, but then sometimes they would just come in during their lunch break and these are like ninth grade boys were talking about and I had a couple of swords which probably today like I don't know if I would still have those, but they would. You know, they would just kind of fool around and the question that we took up in that unit was thinking about what is love, so very sort of like interesting, I guess, for ninth graders. I didn't choose that topic, by the way, I think about that a lot because students were really engaged and because the topic is something that mattered to them a lot.
Elena Forzani:And I think about it because for me, it's about reading and text and making meaning with the world is about ourselves, right, and how we relate to other human beings, and so I think that's an example where my students were not inserting themselves in the text but using the text to think about their own relationships and their ninth graders.
Elena Forzani:So they're already thinking about a lot about relationships and their own identities and things like that, and it was a time that was like fun too. I think sometimes we forget that reading and making meaning with text and with other human beings, like the purpose of it is for us to relate to other humans and communicate with other humans and be in a world where we're not alone, basically where we're connecting. It's about connection, and so I think that's why that particular moment really comes back to me. Another reason it comes back to me is that teaching and learning is about relationships first, and those were moments, too, when my students were connected to one another, they were connected to me, so it wasn't like they were just reading in isolation, which is we do too right, and that matters too when we're connecting with the author, with characters. But it's also about connecting with students, which is something that's really important to me, and so my research also gets back to relationships.
Lindsay Persohn:First, that's such an important point to underscore because I think sometimes in the teaching of reading that can get lost in translation right that it really is about our relationships with really first and foremost ourselves. In fact, I was working on a project this morning where we were talking a lot about the development of reader identity and just how continuous that process is, even when we might feel as learners like we kind of got that stuff down. But we are continuously in development, particularly if we consider ourselves to be lifelong learners. I think that's such an important point. I love that example of your ninth grade boys stopping by at lunch to grab a sword and reenact Romeo and Juliet. What a cool way to think about how reading becomes a part of our lives and a part of who we are. It does become a space for rehearsal, for thinking and for being. That's just such a great reminder, particularly in, I think, a text that gets beat up an awful lot.
Elena Forzani:Yeah, and for fair reasons. Right, but I like that idea too of rehearsal. That's an interesting way to think about. We read text and we apply it to our own lives and we might rehearse different scenarios, different ways of responding to the things going on in our lives.
Lindsay Persohn:I think we even use characters, ideas and consequences as sort of an out of body rehearsal. We can see how things unfold for them and then make choices about what we would try differently or what we might think about differently, what we would do differently, based on the characters' experience.
Elena Forzani:Yeah, absolutely. I also like what you said about identity development. I think a lot of the conversation around reading these days, and even around education more generally, we forget we're teaching human beings and it's about developing as a whole person and not just developing our reading skills or developing our science skills. I think sometimes, yeah, we forget about the fact that students are our whole people, with lots of facets to their identities.
Lindsay Persohn:We are heads that are actually attached to bodies. Yeah, there's a lot more to it than just intellectual development.
Elena Forzani:That's right yeah.
Lindsay Persohn:So, Elena, what do you want listeners to know about your work?
Elena Forzani:I think sort of picking up on the anecdote I mentioned about my ninth grade boys, you know, reenacting Romeo and Juliet, I think, even though I have several strands to my work I'm really interested in how people are making meaning using text and how they're making meaning with other human beings so that we live lives that are meaningful to us.
Elena Forzani:I guess what else can we ask for except to connect with other humans?
Elena Forzani:It's literally like what makes us human is that we live in a social world and everything we do is about relationships and connections, and so one of the ways we do that is through text, and I think I take a very broad view of text, thinking about not just written text but the multiple modes of text that people use to sort of make sense of the world more broadly. You know, people communicate and make sense with you know, linguistically, with written text, but also with oral texts, like we're doing now with images and video, visual text, with gesture and movement, through dance and play and actually acting, like my ninth graders did, and I think all those different modes are so, so, so important. We really privilege linguistic texts, linguistic written text, and we still, even in the 21st century when there are so many forms of text out there and really in a world where linguistic text is not always privileged in the real world anymore, if you look- on the internet or literally the podcast we're doing right now.
Elena Forzani:Right, the world is structured differently, people don't always have the time to engage, and also the medium is important.
Elena Forzani:You know, depending on what message you're trying to give and what you're trying to communicate, the medium matters, and so sometimes what you want to communicate is better communicated in an image.
Elena Forzani:And then we have all these mashups, of course, if you think about Twitter and Facebook, and those are mashups of video, image, words. But we choose our medium, date and our mode based on hopefully based on what we're trying to say and what would best convey what we're trying to say. So I think there is a tension a little bit between the world as it exists now and the ways in which we make meaning out in the world, versus what we still privilege in the classroom. But I would say, for me, what's important is teaching students to make intentional choices about the modes that they are using, which then also means teaching them all the mode, how to use all the modes, and not just written text. The other thing I would say that I would want listeners to know about my work and about meaning making in general is that I think we want to give students the tools, not just to be able to choose the modes they work in, but to really think deeply, to be able to analyze, to critique the world around them, to be critical of the world.
Elena Forzani:So they're not just relying on other people to make decisions for them, and so that they have the tools to do whatever it is that they want to do. I look a lot at how people evaluate the credibility of information, and I think it's important because if we don't know how to do that, we are sort of relying on somebody else to make important decisions for us, and there, whoever is making those decisions for us, they may have different interests than we do. They may have commercial, financial interests that are not in our best interest, and so I think it's really important for us to give kids the tools to be able to evaluate information for themselves and to think deeply and critically, both so they can make meaning in terms of their own identities and their development and how they are connecting with other humans, and it goes hand in hand with being able to make their own decisions in the world and to be critical of existing power and political structures, and to be able to have the tools to change those structures when they don't like them.
Lindsay Persohn:There's a real tension that I think exists in what schools expect from kids, which is typically and this reminds me of a conversation I had with James Gee About how schools expect kids to be obedient and to do the work of school, to do that kind of the compliance that we expect in school. And yet the world demands something very different from young people and, as you were talking about that, alina, I was thinking about how this analyzing and critiquing in order to make decisions I feel like so many young people have to do that kind of work outside of school. They're already doing that work outside of school, but it's just not privileged inside of school.
Elena Forzani:Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, they're doing it right in their own lives when they're out on social media. They have to do that all the time and we're not always giving them the tools to be able to even know how to think about it, necessarily. And so right. Where are they getting those tools if not at school?
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, I guess lately I've been thinking a lot about the systems in schools and because I think often these are systemic kinds of challenges that teachers are trying to work within and still find a productive and humanizing path forward. But when we think about the way that the systems of school are set up, they don't necessarily make space for these kinds of ways of thinking. For, as you mentioned the multiple modes, when you were talking about giving kids tools in multiple modes and helping them to think about how they use those to convey their message in the most productive ways, I was thinking about assessment and how I think one of the reasons why folks and systems and schools shy away from encouraging different modes of communication is that well, it's hard to put into a rubric right, it's hard to grade everyone in a standardized kind of way if everyone is communicating in their own mode.
Elena Forzani:Yeah, that's an interesting point because you're saying, basically, that's an assessment where it's not a one size fits all assessment. Different kids get to make different sort of choices about what they're doing, which reminds me of, actually, when I did teach high school. We did these end of unit projects, like we did one for Romeo and Juliet, for example, where and this was not my, this was like in collaboration with a colleague who taught with me, but kids got to choose a project, like among different things, and so some of the things they would do were like create a CD, a soundtrack for Romeo and Juliet, or like write a comic strip, and it is challenging because everyone's creating a different project. But I think what's really great about it is it forced us as teachers to think about, well, what are the actual skills that we want students to walk away with that they can demonstrate in these different, you know, still having these choices and using these different modes, and it also offered this really nice opportunity for students to talk about why they made the designs, choices that they did. So we had them, you know, accompany their projects with a. It was a written reflection, but you could imagine, you know, it could have been an audio reflection or a PowerPoint or some other video reflection, but thinking, having that sort of meta process of thinking about why did I make the mode choices that I did, why did I pick these particular songs. So I think there are a lot of opportunities, certainly an assessment opportunities, that we don't necessarily have when we're just thinking in one mode and that also opens a whole can of worms about you know, some of the assessment work I've been doing around.
Elena Forzani:You know, assessments are sort of designed to be this one size fits all approach, literally like that is the history. What an assessment is is we're going to pick this one construct, define it, assume that all human beings do it in the same way and we're going to assess that one thing as if all humans in the world were the same. So reading is a great example, right, because we read in so many different ways. It's so context dependent, it's socially dependent, it's culturally dependent, it's situational activity dependent, and yet we still design assessments as if reading were this one thing that was devoid of context. And that's just not the case in the real world. And we have a lot of work. You know now that that shows that and documents that.
Elena Forzani:So I think we really need to rethink how we are approaching assessment and sort of turn assessment on its head in that sense of you know, right now we design assessments with this again, with this assumption that all humans are the same, we're going to design the assessment as if everybody is the same and then we sort of retrofit it. We go through this process after after the assessment is designed to try to limit the extent to which it might not correctly measure for different populations of learners. And I think we really need to flip that. We need to design from the outset with a diverse population in mind and really think through what does that mean for the construct we're measuring? What does it mean for the design choices we're making? What does it mean for how we're scoring and measuring and distributing scores and disseminating information?
Elena Forzani:And one of the key things that to me, is so important in that work is actually partnering with the people, that the assessment is supposed to actually serve the people who, you know, improve their learning and support their development as people.
Elena Forzani:But so often assessment is done to learners rather than with and for them. And I really think if we start from the outset, if we partner as multiple stakeholders on an assessment that are all impacted by assessment. We have forces, design choices throughout that serve the needs of multiple people, and so I think I guess I'm back to your question about like so hard to develop assessment that is not a one size fits all like, yes, and we can do that, and I think there are a lot of awesome opportunities to gather information there that we don't necessarily have in a one size fits all approach, and it's just more accurate. It's what we want, right? We want we want to reflect the way that people are actually reading in the 21st century, and not just reading a printed story and answering some questions. It's just not how we make meaning. I mean, it's one of many ways that we make meaning in the world today, but there are so many others.
Lindsay Persohn:Well, and what you're saying about shifting our thinking about assessment, it really does make me think that, you know, if we could get there right, if we could design authentic assessments that reflect what learners know and can do in a real world kind of way, it could force the hand of some of our educational systems to reconsider what is it we actually value, right?
Lindsay Persohn:Like you were saying, with Romeo and Juliet, as you're designing an assessment tool, maybe a rubric or something like that, that would help not only your learners to understand the task at hand and sort of what should be demonstrating in their work, but it really does sort of force us to think more intentionally about what it is that we're trying to teach, right, and you know, not kind of missing the boat on some of the biggest ideas, which I think, whenever we get into this sort of where we're following a script, we're teaching to a standardized test that's so decontextualized.
Lindsay Persohn:But the way you're talking about thinking about assessment in my mind is it's built from the context, so it's a whole different way of thinking about how we actually value what we might say we're valuing, and then also how we reflect on that as critical practitioners. How do we teach, what we intend to teach. How do we ensure that the learners in front of us are getting what we'd hoped and I think sometimes it's so much more than that right, that's been my experience with young people. We may give them a task that we envision in some particular way, and then, with their creativity and brilliance, they share something that is so far above and beyond anything you could have expected.
Elena Forzani:Absolutely.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, but that's the antithesis of what you would get from a standardized assessment.
Elena Forzani:That's right. You know, a room sort of in a standardized assessment for right, like sometimes students just take things and go a different direction. That's amazing and it is something you didn't think of and I love. Actually, you know, in my literacy assessment course we sort of work together to even design the assessments and the rubrics and they come up with things that we should put in our rubrics that are really honestly, brilliant. That I just didn't, you know, as a single person creating a draft rubric didn't think about. So I think students absolutely do that you also mentioned, like, what is it we value? And that assessment sort of push us to think about this question, and that's absolutely right.
Elena Forzani:We assess what we value, right, and so I think assessment has this long history of there's this assumption of what we value that's baked into all of our standardized assessments, where no one you know stops to think well, is this actually what the way that we value meaning making? Is this assessment really reflecting what we value in the 21st century today? Because that's the thing about assessment is that somebody somewhere making the assessment is literally gets to decide what is valued. Even if you think about common core, it's like okay, well, group of people sat down and they determined what is valued.
Elena Forzani:And you know, what's valued is different across different communities and cultures and people, and so I think that's another reason it's so important to have multiple perspectives and multiple people at a table, because, you know, there's no one right answer right For what we should or shouldn't value. We have to decide, and what we value changes from decade to decade. But assessments are definitely like those are instantiations of our social values, and so I think they require constant critique of you know, is this still what we want? Is this still what we value? And who gets to decide what it is we value? And maybe it's possible that we have lots of different values, different people about you know. Imagine that different people value different things, and that's okay. So let's design an assessment that reflects multiple forms of reading and multiple values, depending on the context in which you're using them.
Lindsay Persohn:This reminds me of something that has been going through my head in the last at least several weeks. It's been ringing pretty loudly, but I feel like the older I get and the more people I work with, the more willing I become to think about my own assumptions and how whatever I think may not be the best way to think about something right. And I think that that may be because I'm 20 years deep into education, because you do see young people coming up with such incredible ideas that would have never even been on my radar. So I think that there's something we have to give up a little bit of control in order to think that someone else might have a better idea about this than we do, and we just have to be willing to, I think, hear that and listen to that. And to me, that is one of the most exciting things about teaching is, you know, getting to share in and to hear about new ideas and new ways of thinking. But, again, it's not easy to measure.
Elena Forzani:Yeah, but I totally agree with that. I think you know, especially in school, like it is this one-size-fits-all approach and we really teach kids from a young age and our assessments again like instantiate this idea that we should figure out what we think is right and we should argue that point. We start with our argument up front and then we sort of teach kids how to cherry pick evidence to fit their argument and why they're right, which you know. Not that we can say what's caused what, but we live in this world where people are just argument first instead of really questioning their own assumptions, listening to other possible perspectives, looking at lots of perspectives and the evidence that goes with it first, and then coming to a conclusion and just and only then deciding OK, here's my argument, here's what I think, and oh, that can change. I think we live in this world where we teach kids that they shouldn't change their mind right, like they shouldn't be open to other ideas, because that makes them look like they're stupid or something, whereas I agree with you, the best work is when somebody has a perspective other than your own and it actually changes the way that you think. So I think that it's one of the things that I found in my work on evaluation is that kids that have this sort of flexible skepticism do so much better. They have this, this idea that they're critical but they're also flexible at the same time. So they understand, you know, they don't just go in with a point of view. They understand that information changes and that it might change depending on who's asking the question, or might change depending on new evidence, and they're sort of able to be flexible in the way they approach the world and information while at the same time not just like believing everything right. They're critical at the same time. But I don't think that's really a habit of mind that our classrooms are designed to support. I think it's actually kind of the opposite.
Elena Forzani:We design kids, you know. We see the persuasive essay, even my kindergartener right. It gets taught like pick your favorite color and then argue your point. Instead of well, let's, let's think about, you know, what are the advantages and disadvantages of different colors for different purposes? Which like, instead of just there being one right answer. My favorite color is teal. It could be well, I like teal for clothing and I, like, you know, yellow for my toys, whatever the case might be. Or yellow has these qualities, and teal has these qualities. So I think we can approach things in a much more nuanced way and we can do a much better job teaching kids to do that sort of flexible thinking instead of just this one answer is right, and then maybe we wouldn't have quite the political climate we have now, where people are just arguing without really considering possibilities or considering that two points of view might both, even though they seem like they disagree. Well, they can coexist and we can have multiple realities and viewpoints that you know that work for different people.
Lindsay Persohn:So yeah, yeah, I love that phrase. You used flexible skepticism, you know, because I do think so often we promote face value, kind of thinking, right, like, even as you're talking about a persuasive essay. Why in the world do we take opinion, an honest to goodness opinion, and then try to argue why it's right? You know, the two things just don't really don't really add up, you know, and you're right. I would agree that I think that's led to quite a lot of the current discourse, you know, particularly across America right now. You know, we all believe that our opinion is the only way to believe in things and I'm less and less convinced of that every day.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, or that there's one. There's one right answer yeah.
Elena Forzani:I love like I couldn't sleep last night and I was reading an article in the New York Times about the origins of coronavirus, which has been like a long standing but you know, a long standing question and we don't really know. And I love, though, that the author he's basically talking about the work I do on online evaluation, because he's saying, you know, basically popular opinion is like whatever narrative is sticky with people for narrative reasons, like why the story and the plot are good, versus looking at the evidence and really considering the evidence, and in this case, I mean, I think the author leans toward the idea that, and he gives all this evidence that leans toward the idea that coronavirus might have been started at the market, the who and on market.
Elena Forzani:But you know, he basically says, as we've seen, we really don't know and we might never know. And so I just I love it because it's like sometimes we can get close to the, to what we think might be the truth, but we don't know and all we can do is update on the information as we get new evidence and hold different possibilities, like, yeah, it might be that that there are these different possibilities and sometimes there's more than one possibility.
Lindsay Persohn:and I know we've talked about everything from digital texts, romeo and Juliet to the coronavirus, but is there anything else that you'd like listeners to know about your work?
Elena Forzani:We haven't really talked much about the science of reading, but I think it's so important for us to remember that, like, yes, we have to teach kids you know how to decode written written English text, for sure, but that is one component out of many components on a broad spectrum of what it needs to read, and I really worry that we're going to focus so much on the alphabetical and on teaching phonics, which, again, like, so important, no question, but we also need to make sure we're giving kids a chance to engage in discussion and critical reasoning around text and do all these higher level things, and that's really the goal is that kids can make meaning and critique and be able to do all those things. So I think that is just something we really need to hold in our minds.
Lindsay Persohn:I couldn't agree more. Yes, of course, phonics and decoding is important, but decoding is not equivalent to understanding and I think that that has gotten lost in the shuffle somewhere. It's you know. It's almost like well, if you can decode, then you've got it all. Well, no, I mean, you've kind of got. It may not be a drop in a bucket. It may be a drop in a bucket, but it's at least a drop in a glass right of what we need to know in order to be readers and comprehenders and meaning makers and really, ultimately, change makers In our own world. Decoding is not going to get us there.
Elena Forzani:That's right and I think you know, one of the things I see taken up, especially in schools, is the simple view, which is fine, like that explains comprehension to a certain degree, which is the idea. You know, decoding times, listening comprehension which is essentially background knowledge, will produce comprehension and it will like on a superficial, basic sort of comprehension level. But there's so much more. You know it's not just that automatic process and boom, you're done like.
Elena Forzani:Teachers actually then need to give students opportunities to engage in this discussion and critique and thinking more deeply, and not just okay, I understand what the author wrote, it's no, you know, the way you understand a text, lindsay, might be different than how I understand it, and the way you crit your critiques might be different than my critiques, and so we have to do more than just, you know, use the simple view to assume that there's this basic level. So I think another thing I would say that I feel is so important for schools to consider is looking at more complex views of reading, like the active, like Duke and Cartwrights active view I'm really thinking about okay, once kids decode and have background knowledge, what do we then do? What does our comprehension instruction look like? That supports deep comprehension.
Lindsay Persohn:Right, because the simple view of reading, that kind of understanding, might get us the right answer on a standardized test, but it may not ultimately help us to think differently about life and our own background and the information that we've received.
Elena Forzani:Yeah, that's right and I think even now, standardized tests certainly ask us to critique certainly Nate, you know, asks us to critique and Common Core asks us to critique and the simple view doesn't account for that. That's really what we want to do. We want students to be able to critique text and think analytically and deeply about them and connect and make meaning with them.
Lindsay Persohn:So, given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want teachers to hear?
Elena Forzani:Yeah, I mean I would say my work in how kids evaluate credibility is really, for me, focused on how can they make meaning in the world at a high level that's relevant to them and to how they want to live their lives. And you mentioned actually this idea of you know, school is built around kids being compliant versus the world. That really demands something different, and so, for me, teaching kids to critique information is giving them the tools to not just be compliant in the world and accept things as they are and especially accept like the power structures that are in the world, but to critique those and to be change makers, as you said, to change them. And I think, like my work and assessment has that same goal. Working on assessment really pushes us to decide what do we value, what do we care about, what are we teaching kids? And pushes us to then think about well, okay, how are we getting them there? So I think they're connected in that sense for sure.
Lindsay Persohn:Absolutely, absolutely Well. Alayna, I thank you so much for your time today and I thank you for your contributions to the field of education.
Elena Forzani:Yeah, thank you, lindsay. I appreciate the conversation and you've certainly left me some things to think about, which is always really nice. To have a conversation with another person that sort of you know shifts your thinking in large and small ways. I appreciate that.
Lindsay Persohn:Great Well, thank you. Dr Elena Forzani's research centers on using multiple and mixed methods to understand and support digital literacy practices across the elementary and secondary levels. Her work investigates the cognitive, metacognitive and motivational dimensions of online reading and especially how readers evaluate the credibility of online information. Through this work, dr Forzani seeks to inform the design of equity oriented instruction and assessment environments. Dr Forzani's scholarship has been published in multiple researcher and practitioner journals, including reading research quarterly, computers and human behavior, computers and education open, the reading teacher and the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. Dr Forzani currently serves on the US Department of Education's National Assessment of the Educational Progress Standing Reading Committee. Through her doctoral work in educational psychology at the University of Connecticut, dr Forzani has served as the Assistant Research Director for the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, or PURLS, an International Print Reading Assessment, and E-PURLS, an International Digital Reading Assessment. She's a former first grade and high school English and reading teacher, as well as a former literacy specialist. Dr Elena Forzani is an assistant professor in literacy education at Boston University's Wheelock College of Education and Human Development.
Lindsay Persohn:For the good of all students, classroom Caffeine aims to energize education, research and practice. If this show gives you things to think about. Help us spread the word. Talk to your colleagues and educator friends about what you hear. You can support the show by subscribing, liking and reviewing this podcast through your podcast provider. Visit classroomcaffeinecom, where you can subscribe to receive our short monthly newsletter, the Espresso Shot. On our website, you can also learn more about each guest, find transcripts for our episodes, explore topics using our drop-down menu of tags, request an episode, topic or potential guest. Support our research through our listener survey or learn more about the research we're doing on our publications page. Connect with us on social media through Instagram, facebook and Twitter. We would love to hear from you. Special thanks to the Classroom Caffeine team Leah Berger, abaya Veluru, stephanie Branson and Shaba Hojfath. As always, I raise my mug to you teachers. Thanks for joining me.