Amber Benedict

Guiding Research Questions:

• How can we best support teachers, or teams of teachers, who are working with students who struggle to read?
• What types of professional learning experiences are most useful in improving teachers’ instructional practice?

Current projects:

Amber is Co-Principal Investigator on Project Coordinate, which is a professional development grant funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences (IES). In this project, Amber supports teams of general and special education teachers to increase their shared knowledge and skills about multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) which includes instruction with continuous data collection and assessment to help students who struggle to read. This project currently involves 16 school partners in Arizona. 

For Project DIMES: Diagnostic Instrument for Morphology of Elementary Students, an IES measurement grant, Amber serves as Co-Principal Investigator on a project to develop a computer based diagnostic assessment of morphological awareness (K-6 students’ knowledge of prefixes, suffixes, and base words). She is working in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Florida, University of Iowa, and Vanderbilt to develop this instrument.

In a third project, Amber serves as Co-Principal Investigator for a cybersecurity codebreaking grant funded by the National Science Foundation. Working with an interdisciplinary team from educational neuroscience and computer sciences at the University of Florida and consultants in cyber security, they design hybrid modules that are app-based and face-to-face, to teach students about cybersecurity, code writing, and hacking (breaking code). Amber’s role is to embed literacy instruction within this scope, given her knowledge of student development and literacy content.