Laura Allen joined UNH in 2019 as an assistant professor of psychology. She earned a B.A. in English Literature and Foreign Languages from Mississippi State University (2010), followed by a masters (2015) and Ph.D. from Arizona State University (2017). Dr. Allen then worked for two years as an assistant professor in the Psychology Department at Mississippi State University. The principal aim of her research has been to theoretically and empirically investigate the higher-level cognitive skills that are required for successful text comprehension and production, as well as the ways in which performance in these domains can be enhanced through strategy instruction and training. She has conducted a number of studies to understand how individual differences in cognitive skills and knowledge relate to performance on reading comprehension and writing assessments. This research has revealed numerous characteristics of successful readers and writers, such as their ability to generate inferences, their knowledge of vocabulary, and their ability to flexibly adapt their language across multiple tasks. Further research has endeavored to develop a more specific understanding of these individual differences through multi-dimensional computational analyses of the texts that students produce. This line of empirical research strategies has naturally been accompanied by a second line of work that explores how educational technologies can be leveraged to facilitate learning. For instance, she has recently begun work on the development of the Writing Assessment Tool (WAT), which aims to provide researchers, students, and teachers with automated analyses of writing. The overall goal of this research is to develop a tool that will have a broad impact on current practices in writing research and instruction across multiple dimensions.
