Ayo Aborishade is a doctoral student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her research explores assessment and how it impacts placement and support provided to students with learning disabilities who come from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.  By taking a closer look at assessment practices and their impact on placement and support, Ayo hopes to improve educational equity and ensure that students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds have access to resources they need to succeed academically. She received her bachelor’s degree in Special Education from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and her master’s degree in Special Education from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Jechun An is a Post-Doctoral Associate at the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Minnesota. His role is managing the data for two federally funded projects (Numbershire and Early Language Comprehension Individualized instruction; ELCII) that entail large-scale efficacy trials of educational technology focusing on literacy and mathematics. He started my education career as a tenured elementary teacher in a rural area of Korea. After that, he worked as a secondary school principal qualification program coordinator at the National Academy for Educational Administrators at Seoul National University in Korea. Until 2024, he was a lab manager of a federally funded project (The Early Writing Project) to provide professional development for elementary teachers who have students with difficulties in writing.

Kate Connor is an assistant professor of special education at Western Michigan University. Her research interests include improving the literacy outcomes of individuals with disabilities and sustained professional learning opportunities in literacy for special and general education teachers.

April Hill earned her PhD at Texas Woman’s University and is a Special Education Instructor at Northern Michigan University. She holds a B.A. in History from Texas A&M University College Station and a M.Ed. in Special Education from Midwestern State University. She has 19 years of experience in public education special education, including 14 years as an Educational Diagnostician. As a district administrator she was responsible for overseeing the special education evaluation policies, procedures, and practices, as well as ensuring the federal and state compliance of IEP and FIE timelines. Her research focuses on the use of equity-focused practices to address special education disproportionality and the use of special education processes to develop meaningful family-school partnerships.

Shannon D. Pardue is a doctoral candidate in Special Education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she also serves as a graduate assistant at the Mebane Early Literacy Center. A Board Certified Behavior Analyst and former high school special education teacher, her professional background spans over 15 years in clinical, vocational, residential, and K–12 educational settings. Her research focuses on leveraging structured cognitive strategy instruction and AI-generated materials aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) to enhance reading comprehension and engagement for high school students with learning disabilities, with the goal of increasing equitable access to the general education curriculum. Shannon’s current dissertation examines the effectiveness of CUT to the Message, a standards-aligned intervention grounded in the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) framework, using a single-case experimental design that compares AI-generated passages with textbook materials to investigate their impact on reading comprehension and student engagement. Her long-term goal is to expand this work through randomized controlled trials as a tenure-track faculty member at a research-intensive institution.

Latesha Watson, is a Ph.D. student at Temple University’s College of Education and Human Development, specializing in special education. She brings 15 years of experience as an educational administrator and special education teacher. Her research focuses on culturally and linguistically equitable literacy, technology, and learning outcomes for youth with disabilities. 

Dr. Heba Abdelnaby is a Palestinian educator and scholar specializing in special education, academic support and reading interventions. She has worked with UNRWA supporting Palestinian refugee students, developing educational content, and training teachers in Gaza City and across the Middle East. She obtained a master’s and Ph.D. in special education from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her research focuses on supporting academic performance and literacy skills for all learners, including multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Outside academia, she enjoys family time with her husband and three children, walking, reading, and volunteering.

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