Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum Spiral - 1997

Marilyn Jager Adams, Ph.D., is a cognitive and developmental psychologist who has devoted her career to research and applied work in the area of cognition and education. Dr. Adams' scholarly contributions include the book Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print (MIT Press, 1994). Among honors, she has received the American Educational Research Association's Sylvia Scribner Award and The International Dyslexia Association's Samuel Torrey Orton Award.

Dr. Adams chaired the planning committee for the National Academy of Sciences (1998) report Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children and has served since 1992 on the planning or steering committees for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading. She also developed a vocabulary assessment for the 2014 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) and was on the development team for the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy.

Dr. Adams has authored a number of empirically validated classroom resources, including Odyssey: A Curriculum for Thinking (Charlesbridge Publishing, 1986), which was originally developed for barrio students in Venezuela; Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum (Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., 1998) on language and literacy basics for emergent readers and students with special needs; Open Court's 1995 edition of Collection for Young Scholars, a program for reading, writing, and literacy development for elementary school students; and Scholastic's System 44 (2009) and iRead (2013), technology-based programs for building literacy foundations. She has also served on the advisory board for several of the Public Broadcasting System's educational programs including Sesame Street and Between the Lions, for which she was Senior Literacy Advisor.

Dr. Adams spent most of her career with the think tank Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN Technologies-"Where Wizards Stay up Late") in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 2000 to 2007, she was Chief Scientist at Soliloquy Learning, which she cofounded with the goal of harnessing automatic speech recognition for helping students learn to read and read to learn. She is currently a visiting scholar in the Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences Department at Brown University. She has two children: John, who is working toward a Ph.D. in social psychology, and Jocie, who is striving to be a musician. Her husband, Milton, is a rocket scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Charles Stark Draper Labs.

Barbara R. Foorman, Ph.D., earned her doctorate at the University of California-Berkeley. She is Professor of Pediatrics and Director of the Center for Academic and Reading Skills at the University of Texas-Houston Medical School and Principal Investigator of the grant funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), Early Interventions for Children with Reading Problems. In addition to many chapters and journal articles on topics related to language and reading development, she is the editor of Reading Acquisition: Cultural Constraints and Cognitive Universals (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986). She is on the editorial board of Journal of Learning Disabilities and has guest edited special issues of Scientific Studies of Reading, Linguistics and Education and Journal of Learning Disabilities. Dr. Foorman has been actively involved in outreach to the schools and to the general public, having chaired Houston Independent School District's Committee on a Balanced Approach to Reading and having testified before the California and Texas legislatures and the Texas Board of Education Long-Range Planning Committee. Dr. Foorman is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, the board of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, the Consortium on Reading Excellence (CORE), and several local reading efforts. Ingvar Lundberg, Ph.D., was first trained as a school teacher and served in inner-city schools in Stockholm, Sweden. Later, he entered an academic career and became Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Ume. He has published a dozen books, primarily in Scandinavian languages and a large number of scientific articles, particularly in the field of reading and language development. He served on the steering committee of the largest survey of reading achievement in the world, including more than 30 countries. He is a fellow of several academies and learned societies and serves on the editorial board of a number of scientific journals. He is currently affiliated with the Department of Psychology at Gteborg, Sweden, where he directs a research program on communication disabilities. Terri Beeler, Ed.D., has more than 20 years of experience in education, in both teaching and administration. Dr. Beeler is Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Education at the University of Houston's downtown campus. Within the responsibilities of that position, she is one of the coordinators of a totally field-based teacher education program, which allows her to work with both preservice and in-service teachers and also continue to be in classrooms with children. In addition, she does a great deal of staff development and consultant work in the area of early literacy development, specifically phonemic awareness and guided reading. She is also a co-editor of the State of Reading, the journal of the Texas State Reading Association, and author of I Can Read, I can Write: Creating a Print-Rich Environment (Creative Teaching Press, 1993).