Professor Christopher Lonigan has won a $5 million grant to train doctoral students to do advanced research on the best ways of teaching reading, math, and science to schoolchildren. The five-year renewal grant from the U.S. Department of Education will support the university’s Predoctoral Interdisciplinary Research Training (PIRT) program, founded by Lonigan and Professor Chris Schatschneider in 2004 and originally designed to focus on reading.

With the renewed grant, PIRT, which is housed in the Florida Center for Reading Research, will expand its focus to include research into the best ways to teach math and science to kids. Lonigan is the principal investigator on two other relatively recent federal grants – one for nearly $2.8 million and the other nearly $1.8 million. Although these two grants have different aims, both work with the same population: young children whose home language is Spanish. The $2.8 million grant focuses on evaluating an intervention to promote children’s development of school readiness skills, while the $1.8 million grant is about developing more refined measures of children’s skills in areas known to be related to later reading skills.

To read more, go to http://www.fsu.edu/news/2009/08/10/education.researchers/