People

Laura Tortorelli is an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. Her scholarship focuses on who teachers teach and how they teach children to read, with a focus on bridging the divides between research and practice. Drawing on developmental perspectives and critical quantitative inquiry, her research investigates the tests, texts and technology that shape reading instruction in elementary classrooms and the impact of these tools on readers who have been labeled as "struggling." Tortorelli has been awarded the Elva Knight research grant (2018; International Literacy Association) and the Jeanne Chall visiting researcher award (2016; Harvard Graduate School of Education). Her work has also been funded by the National Science Foundation. She has been named an Emerging Scholar by the Hall of Reading Fame and selected for competitive early career mentoring programs by the American Educational Research Association and the Society for Research Childhood Development. Tortorelli's research has been published in Reading Research Quarterly, The Reading Teacher, Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Early Childhood Research Quarterly and Reading Psychology and state journals for teachers including Reading in Virginia and Michigan Reading Journal. She is actively involved in state-wide literacy initiatives in Michigan, including training state literacy coaches on the Literacy Essentials and collaborating with Wright to develop on-line modules on Phonological Awareness and Letter-sound Relationships freely available to educators across the state (www.literacyessentials.org)