Curry School of Education

Education

• Ph.D., University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 2009
• M.A., University of Maryland, College Park 2003; CCC-SLP since 2004
• B.A., University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1997

Personal Statement

I am an interdisciplinary researcher and my interests pull from my training and experience as a clinical speech-language pathologist, as well as my doctoral training related to the fields of educational psychology and reading. I am interested in young children’s language and literacy development and the ways in which their everyday learning environments- home and preschool- may shape their learning and early school successes. I am particularly interested in understanding the types of instructional practices and experiences which matter most to children’s learning within those environments and how and why the quality of these experiences vary so significantly across different homes and schools.

I am co-author of a language and literacy curricular supplement, Read It Again- PreK! (see http://www.myreaditagain.com). This program is freely available and used by many preschool programs, in the U.S. as well as numerous other countries and I have had the chance to work with and learn about the efforts in these diverse localities. I have also recently begun to consider other ways to support adults in providing high-quality instructional support to children and am involved in efforts to build higher education language and literacy courses (online and traditional), as well as online training materials for teachers. My doctoral training was formally within a program on risk and prevention and I continue to focus my work on ways to support the learning and learning environments of young children whose developmental or demographic characteristics place them at risk for later school and reading difficulty. My project work has given me extensive experience working with teachers and preschool centers in rural Appalachian areas within Virginia, West Virginia and Ohio.

I currently advise two doctoral students- one in a joint training program between Reading and Speech-Language Pathology and one in the Educational Psychology: Applied Developmental Science program. I have also enjoyed being a mentor to undergraduate students through the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) for students underrepresented in the field of education research, including racial and ethnic minorities, low-income and first-generation college students. I am involved in the Charlottesville community through consulting with a local Montessori school and my involvement in the United Way/Smart Beginnings School Readiness initiative. (http://www.unitedwaytja.org/SmartBeginnings.shtml).

Sample Recent Publications

• McGinty, A.S. Justice, L.M., Piasta, S.B., & Kaderavek, J. (in press). Does context matter? Explicit print instruction during reading varies in its influence by child and classroom factors.  Early Childhood Research Quarterly.
• McGinty, A.S., Breit-Smith, A., Justice, L.M., Kaderavek, J., & Fan, X. (in press). Does intervention dosage matter? Preschoolers’ emergent literacy growth in within a classroom-based intervention. Early Childhood Research Quarterly.
• McGinty, A. S. Justice, L.M., Gosse, C., & Skibbe, L. (in press). Shared-reading dynamics: Mothers’ question-use and the verbal participation of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.