Lauren Leslie

Significant Achievements of Lauren Leslie, Ph.D.

For 14 years while on the faculty at Marquette University I directed a Literacy Center. The goal of the Center was to improve literacy instruction in urban schools. We enrolled children who had not learned to read by the beginning of 2nd or 3rd grade. University undergraduates in elementary education were the tutors and it was my responsibility to teach and supervised the tutors. This required assisting the prospective teachers how to plan instruction based on assessment results. This project was the foundation of the article by Leslie & Allen cited below.

Books published

Leslie, L. & Caldwell, J. (1990; 1995; 2001; 2006; 2011). Qualitative Reading Inventory. Boston: Pearson. I have co-authored the QRI which has involved passage selection, question writing, scoring, analysis, and interpretation of scores.

Caldwell, J. & Leslie, L. (2005; 2009). Intervention strategies to follow informal reading inventory assessment: So what do I do now? Boston: Allyn and Bacon. In this book we offer how to use the results of informal reading inventories, particularly the QRI, to plan intervention instruction.

Research Awards

Albert J. Harris Research Award (2001) for Leslie, L., & Allen, L. (1999). Factors that predict success in an early intervention project.Reading Research Quarterly, 34, 404-424.

Finalist for Albert J. Harris Research Award (1990) for Bristow, P., & Leslie, L. (1988). Indicators of reading difficulty: Discrimination between instructional and frustration range performance of functionally illiterate adults. Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 200-218.

Other pertinent publications

Leslie, L., & Calhoon, J. (1995). Factors affecting young children's reading of rimes: Reading ability, word frequency, and rime neighborhood size: Journal of Educational Psychology, 87, 576-586.

Calhoon, J., & Leslie, L. (2002). A longitudinal study of the effects of word frequency and rime-neighborhood size on beginning readers’ rime reading accuracy in words and nonwords. Journal of Literacy Research, 34, 39-58.

Caldwell, J., & Leslie, L. (2004). Can 8th grade proficient readers construct meaning in high school material? Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 47, 324 – 335.

Personal life: I love scuba diving with my husband. My son is a creative writer!