ASHA 2019 and Forward

Lots of learning, growing, and moving this fall! It's been an incredible (incredibly full!) semester during which I've found myself feeling increasingly grateful for the students who work in my lab. I had the opportunity at the American Speech-Language Hearing Association 2019 Convention (in Orlando) to talk with friends and colleagues about their experiences with their own research assistants. From what I've heard, our team is truly extraordinary. I already had a decent idea that that was the case, but it's become even more evident the more people I talk with!

If you want to learn more about our awesome team, check out the page highlighting them. They've done a few really cool projects this fall and we're lined up for even more in 2020!
If you're interested in joining the team, check out our current projects and opportunities for students here. 

Highlights from Fall:
1. The Reach Every Reader Assessment project is officially up and running! It's been a challenge to get started, but I am very excited and grateful to be a part of this work in a different way than I was during my postdoc. This multi-university project (we're under the Florida Center for Reading Research branch, but there's also Harvard and MIT) is funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the overall goal is to improve reading in the United States! My nine-person team is focused on piloting the reading assessment I helped develop during my postdoc. We've tested over 100 kids this fall at 5 schools and are working to get to our goal of 300 students by the end of the year. Fun stuff. 
2. We receive an ASHFoundation grant for 2020! Our project titled "Assessment of Spanish-English Speakers’ Language and Literacy Development" was funded through the New Investigators mechanism. This $10,000 grant will run from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020 to fund research being conducted by our lab here in South Carolina and by my co-investigator, Marc Goodrich out in Nebraska. We'll be evaluating the early language and emergent reading skills of Spanish-English speaking dual language learners in kindergarten and Grade 1 to help us determine what assessment approaches best predict children's English reading development. This project is part of a partnership with Lexington 2 School District and specifically Riverbank Elementary. We are so incredibly grateful for the opportunity to work with such wonderful people - teachers, speech-language pathologists, administration, parents, and the kids! It's a beautiful blend of clinical work and research. Couldn't ask for a more amazing group of people to work with. 
3. Personally, I'm very excited for a few smaller things this fall:

•  Autumn McIlraith (friend and fantastic colleague) and I had the opportunity to give a two-hour seminar at ASHA this year focused on dichotomization of continuous variables (bad! If you want to know more, email me and I'll send you our slides and/or talk with you about it!) and alternative approaches when dichotomization seems like the only choice. We had a decent turnout with wonderful attendees and discussion!
• I submitted my dissertation manuscript for publication (finally! Thank you to Anny Castilla-Earls for pushing me on that!)
• A manuscript that's been rejected at least five times at last count (nearly all because the journals didn't think the paper was a good fit) finally got a revise and resubmit! Looking forward to eventually seeing what I think is a very good paper in print. 
• My students keep making cool infographics, like the one below. I should highlight those more often - they're a great resource!