Elizabeth Albro

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT ELIZABETH ALBRO

Building bridges between basic science and education practice defines Liz\'s expertise. Trained in the behavioral and social sciences, with an emphasis on psychology, cognition, and communication, Liz brings expertise in the basic sciences of learning to education practice. Since 2002, Liz has been part of the Institute of Education Sciences, the independent research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. She sought to integrate basic and applied work originally as an SRCD Fellow, then as a program officer, and in her roles as Associate Commissioner of Teaching and Learning and as Acting Commissioner of Education Research. She had an early hand in building the Cognition and Student Learning, and Reading and Writing research portfolios. Her vision can be seen in several large scale research efforts, including the National Research and Development Centers on Cognition and Science Instruction, and on Cognition and Math Instruction, as well as in the Reading for Understanding Research Initiative. She also identified and worked closely with the expert panel who wrote one of the first IES Practice Guides, Organizing Instruction to Support Study and Learning. Prior to joining IES, Liz was a faculty member at two liberal arts colleges, Whitter College and Wheaton College (Norton, MA). Her desire to build bridges was clear during her faculty tenure – at Whittier, she was a Child Development faculty in the Department of Education, while at Wheaton, she was a member of the Psychology Department. At both colleges, Liz was responsible for teaching students who intended to be PK-12 teachers. Her goal was to ensure that her students knew what we currently understood about how children learn, and to make sure that these students had the skills they would need to continue to learn about learning once they were in the classroom. All of her work in teacher preparation was grounded in her own experience as a preschool teacher in Cochabamba, Bolivia.