Trina D. Spencer, PhD, of the Rightpath Research & Innovation Center at ±«Óãtv has been awarded a 4 year $1,323,166 research grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences to build a large database of academic language of K-3 students. The overarching aim of this work is to help reduce the language-based achievement gap in primary grades.
Spencer, an education researcher, will collaborate with Randi Reppen and Douglas Biber, corpus linguists from Northern Arizona University, to collect 8000 academic language samples and examine the vocabulary and grammatical features that may be pivotal instructional targets for young disadvantaged studen