Interview with Dr Carol Connor

Dr Carol Connor is the Chancellor's Professor at UCI's School of Education and her research focuses on examining the links between children’s language, cognitive, social-emotional, and literacy and mathematics development from preschool through the elementary grades. Understanding these links may illuminate reasons for the perplexing difficulties children who are atypical and diverse learners have developing basic and advanced reading, writing, and math skills. Most recently, her research interests have focused on children’s learning in the classroom – from preschool through fifth grade – with particular focus on reading comprehension and mathematics, children living in poverty, and how technology might improve the instruction they receive. This line of research is revealing how the effectiveness of specific instructional activities depends on the language, self-regulation, and reading or math skills children bring with them to school; these child-by-instruction interaction effects are evident as early as preschool and continue at least through third grade for a number of child language, literacy, and math outcomes.