Reading, Engagement and Diversity Lab (READ)

Ana Taboada Barber [

Director of the Reading, Engagement, and Diversity (READ) Lab

Ana Taboada Barber serves as Associate Dean of Research, Innovation, and Partnerships, and as Associate Professor in the Department of Counseling, Higher Education, and Special Education. Dr. Taboada Barber studies reading comprehension from a cognitive and motivational perspective. Her work centers on studying the influence of specific motivational variables (e.g., autonomy support, self-efficacy) and cognitive variables (e.g., executive function skills; inference making) on the literacy and language development of elementary and middle school students. She is interested in studying reading comprehension within classroom instructional contexts as well as an individual difference variable. As a former English as a Second Language teacher in full language immersion settings, Ana’s work in reading comprehension development is principally concentrated within the population of English Learners (ELs) or emergent bilinguals within the United States. More recently, she has extended her focus to include Spanish-speaking students in South American countries (e.g., Chile and Argentina) and Francophone countries. In the last ten years, Ana has turned her attention to the possible roles that executive function skills (i.e., working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility as well as Executive Control) as one component of a larger system of self-regulation, play in the reading comprehension of Emergent Bilinguals in English-only and dual language immersion settings.