The Authors
Gina Biancarosa is an advanced doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education,
where she received a Larsen Fellowship and a Spencer Research Training Grant. She has been an
adjunct professor at Boston College. She coauthored, with Catherine Snow, the Carnegie
Corporation of New York report Adolescent Literacy: What Do We Know and Where Do We
Go from Here?; with Ilene Berman, the National Governors Association report Reading to
Achieve: A Governor’s Guide to Adolescent
Literacy, and, with Gil Noam, the book Afterschool Education: Approaches to an Emerging
Field. She has served on adolescent literacy advisory panels for Carnegie Corporation of New
York, the Center for Applied Linguistics, the National School Boards Association, and the New
York City Department of Youth & Community Development. Her dissertation research centers
on the relationship between
reading fluency and reading comprehension. She is currently involved in Boston Public Schools’
efforts to describe the heterogeneity of struggling middle school readers.
Dr. Catherine Snow is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate
School of Education. Snow has recently chaired two national panels: the National Academy of
Sciences committee that prepared the report Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children,
and the RAND Reading Study Group that prepared Reading for Understanding: Toward an R&D
Program in Reading Comprehension. Her current research activities include a longitudinal study
of language and literacy skills among low-income children who have been followed for fifteen
years since age three; following the language development of young children participating in the
Early Head Start intervention; studying the vocabulary development of first- and second-
language learners; and considering aspects of transfer from first to second language in the
domains of language and literacy. Snow has also written about bilingualism and its relation to
language policy issues such as bilingual education in the United States and in developing
nations, and about testing policy. She is currently involved in efforts to improve middle school
literacy outcomes, in partnership with other Boston-area researchers and the Boston Public
Schools.