Barbara Foorman, Ph.D.

Barbara Foorman, Ph.D., is the Kraft Professor of Education, Director Emeritus of the Florida Center for Reading Research, and Director of the Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast at Florida State University. Dr. Foorman is an internationally known expert in reading and was Commissioner of NCER at IES during 2005. She has over 150 publications and was co-editor of the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness and co-founder and on the board of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness. She has been on national consensus panels in reading, chaired the IES Practice Guide panel on Foundational Reading Skills in Support of Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade, and has extensive experience conducting large-scale, multi-site projects on federal grants and contracts. She was PI on a multi-site, $24 million reading interventions project funded by NICHD from 1993-2002, a $6.6 million randomized study of scaling assessment-driven interventions from IES (Goal 4), a measurement grant from IES (2010-2013), a subcontract to ETS to develop pre-K-12th grade reading assessments (2010-2016), and a large randomized trial of early literacy assessments across Florida as part of the REL Southeast contract (2013-2016). Additionally, she has been Co-PI on many NICHD grants when she was at the University of Texas-Houston Health Science Center, most notably an NICHD program project on oracy/literacy in Spanish-speaking children in the Southwest. Dr. Foorman is a primary developer of the Texas Primary Reading Inventory (TPRI) and the Florida Assessments for Instruction in Reading (FAIR), and Lexia Learning’s Reading Assessment for Prescriptive Instructional Data (RAPID).