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Elizabeth Stevens, Ph.D.

"Working to lessen the research to practice gap"

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About Me

Assistant Professor
Department of Special Education
School of Education & Human Science
University of Kansas

Elizabeth Stephens headshotElizabeth Stevens is an Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas. Stevens completed her Ph.D. at The University of Texas at Austin. She holds a master’s degree in special education from the College of William and Mary and a reading specialist degree from the University of Virginia. Prior to pursuing her doctorate, she taught special education for nine years in Virginia. Her research focuses on improving academic outcomes for students with learning disabilities and learning difficulties.

She has been awarded three IES research grants as PI or Co-PI, totaling over $7.1 million. She is PI of Project ALIGN, a 3.8 million efficacy study examining the effects of aligning reading comprehension practices across Tiers 1 and 2 for fifth graders with reading difficulties. Relatedly, she received the 2024 Early Career Publication Award from the Council for Exceptional Children’s Division for Research for an alignment study recently published in Exceptional Children. She is also PI of Math Words, a recently awarded $2.0 million grant aimed at developing a mathematics vocabulary intervention for students with math difficulty in Grades 3 and 4. Finally, she was Co-PI of a completed IES Development project ($1.4 million) focused on a professional development model to help middle school teachers implement research-based practices during content-area reading instruction.

A recipient of the Rebecca Sandak Young Investigator Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, she has extensive experience in designing literacy interventions and examining their efficacy for diverse and at-risk populations, providing PD to districts, and examining the effects of such interventions through high-quality research studies. Stevens has published in numerous high-impact journals, including Scientific Studies of Reading, Exceptional Children, Journal of Learning Disabilities, Reading and Writing, Remedial and Special Education, and Teaching Exceptional Children.

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Testimonials on Liz’s Professional Development Series

"Hands down phenomenal presenter! She shared such great information!"

"I initially chose this session to fulfill the need for college credits. I am so glad I did! Elizabeth knows her stuff. She is highly informative and answered questions from viewers. I would be happy to be a part of future presentations by her."

"Great resources! Excited to give them a try!"

"Liz was amazing and knowledgeable. This would be excellent for early to veteran teachers and staff. I feel like this would be a GREAT training for middle school and high school educators/admin who may have not taught phonics"

"I am thankful I attended this session. It was very informative, and I will use what I have learned today to better myself as a teacher."

"Great Presentation! Very Engaging!"

"Awesome information! Dr. Stevens is a wealth of information. I liked the books she recommended for us to read this summer!"

"Such deep understanding and resource list for further learning. This was exceptional! Thank you!"

"Incredibly helpful! Would highly recommend it to others!"
 

"Worthwhile and informative!"

"The most helpful webinar/in-service training I have received in MANY years! Thank you so very much.  I can’t wait to get the slides to rethink and look forward to digging into these topics on my own."

"So in-depth! All our teachers need to hear her!"

"Please have Dr. Stevens present more training in the future."

"I am so excited to receive all the resources via email that Dr. Stevens shared in this class. I feel so much more prepared for teaching next semester."

"Stevens was very informative and provided beneficial strategies to promote student growth and achievement in the areas of vocabulary development and reading comprehension. I learned a lot from Dr. Stevens' presentations and would definitely appreciate and participate in future workshops given by her. Thank you!"

"Stevens did an excellent job of blending together vocabulary strategies and comprehension strategies for helping struggling readers. I loved that she explicitly walked us through the "Get the Gist" procedure for teaching students how to identify the main idea in a text. I also love that she is either providing resources for us through an email, or she directed us to the website to find the applicable resources. Integrating the learning of informational text structures with analyzing the text for the main idea is also a great idea!"

Learn more about professional development programs

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Greenbush Math Presentation

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