Dr. Courtney Hattan is an assistant professor in the science of reading with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s School of Education. She earned her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Maryland and her reading specialist degree from Johns Hopkins University. She has seen many facets of the educational system, having started out as a language arts and social studies teacher at the elementary and middle school levels. Hattan’s work centers on equitable and evidence-based instruction that supports students in activating and building their background knowledge during reading. She was the 2019 recipient of the Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan Outstanding Dissertation Award and was named a Reading Hall of Fame Emerging Scholars Fellow. Her research is published in outlets such as Review of Educational Research, Reading Research Quarterly, and Journal of Educational Psychology.

In this episode, Courtney provides insights into the life of a tenure-track professor at a top research university. She shares how her teaching experiences with the KWL chart informed her dissertation research. She describes how she combines both qualitative and quantitative research methods to form a fuller picture of the whole story. Courtney also shares about the research she is conducting in partnership with certain rural schools in North Carolina and Illinois to help bridge the gap between research and evidence-based practices that educators can use. She is committed to telling the full story on literacy assessment in particular, in order to best support students’ needs.

Find out more about Courtney’s education, areas of expertise, background, and research at https://ed.unc.edu/people/courtney-hattan/

And you can read Courtney’s dissertation study at 

Hattan, C. (2019). Prompting rural students’ use of background knowledge and experience to support comprehension of unfamiliar content. Reading Research Quarterly, 54(4), 451-455. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.270