Alecia Marie Magnifico is a learning scientist whose research focuses on writing, digital literacies, and learning in formal and informal environments. Currently, she is an assistant professor of English teaching at the University of New Hampshire, where she teaches courses on English teaching, digital literacies, and research methods. Previously, she has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (with the Scholar online collaborative writing project), as a lecturer and graduate research assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (with the Games, Learning, and Society team and the Department of Educational Psychology), and as a middle and high school classroom teacher. Magnifico's research interests focus on understanding how to support and encourage adolescents' writing for different audiences. While most schoolwork is turned in to teachers and receives little feedback, writing for active, communicative audiences can help young writers to reflect on their own ideas, to present those ideas effectively, and to revise and refine their work. Much of Magnifico's writing in this area describes and theorizes adolescents' literacies in different contexts (e.g. school, extracurricular, and online settings), although she also works with teachers to design curricula and assessments that engage multiple literacy skills including reading, writing, multimedia, and critique. She also enjoys the challenge of developing research methods to represent what happens in these complex, social learning spaces. Magnifico's recent work can be found in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, E-Learning and Digital Media, and the International Journal of Educational Psychology.
