Donna Scanlon, Ph.D.

Dr. Scanlon is professor emeritus at the University at Albany’s Department of Literacy Teaching and Learning and was affiliated with the University’s Child Research and Study Center (CRSC) for more than 40 years, serving as associate director and director at different points. Her research and teaching focused on the characteristics of children who experience substantial difficulty in learning to read and on how to prevent and remediate reading difficulties. She and her colleagues developed an approach to early literacy instruction and intervention, the Interactive Strategies Approach (ISA), which was found to be effective in reducing the incidence of reading difficulties in the early primary grades. Classroom teachers, as well as intervention teachers, have successfully implemented the ISA approach in small group and one-to-one contexts.

The approach is described in Early Intervention for Reading Difficulties: The Interactive Strategies Approach, 2nd Ed (Scanlon, Anderson, & Sweeney, 2017).  An upward extension of the approach intended to address reading difficulties among middle elementary and middle school students was developed and tested in a subsequent series of studies and is described in Comprehensive Reading Intervention in Grades 3-8: Fostering Word Learning, Comprehension, and Motivation (Gelzheiser, Scanlon, Hallgren-Flynn, & Connors, 2019). Most of Dr. Scanlon’s research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the U.S. Department of Education through the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE).