Anne E. Cunningham

Assistant Research Educator

Research Biography

Anne Cunningham serves at the UC Berkeley director of the Joint Doctoral Program in Special Education. Known for her research in literacy development, she has been the principal investigator of several large-scale literacy projects and currently serves as a principal investigator of A Longitudinal Study of Preschool Literacy in High Poverty Schools, funded by the Institute of Educational Studies.

Her research focuses on cognitive development and instruction across the life span. She studies the interplay of context, instruction, and disability in reading acquisition and development. She also investigates the cognitive consequences of literacy or how literacy shapes cognition among adolescents and adults.

She has served as an elected board member of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading and AERA's Division C. She is an editorial board member of Journal of Learning Disabilities, Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Educational Psychology, Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, The Reading Teacher, and The California Reader. She has served on national expert panels for literacy initiatives including the Reading Excellence Act, Reading First, and National Early Literacy Panel.

Recent publications include: "Accounting for children's orthographic learning while reading text: Do children self-teach?" in Journal of Experimental Child Psychology (2006); "Vocabulary Growth through Independent Reading and Reading Aloud to Children," in E. H. Hiebert & M. Kamil (Eds.), Teaching and Learning Vocabulary: Bringing Research to Practice (2005); "Disciplinary Knowledge of K-3 Teachers and their Knowledge Calibration in the Domain of Early Literacy," in Annals of Dyslexia (with K. Perry et al., 2004); and "The Value of Reading Volume and Engagement in Young Children," in Encyclopedia of Education (2003).

Anne Cunningham Research Biography, April 2008