[mcooperborkenhagen at fsu.edu]

My name is Matt and I do research on language, reading development, and the educational extensions of these topics. I am an Assistant Professor at Florida State University in the Reading Education Area of the School for Teacher Education and the Florida Center for Reading Research.

I am interested in how kids develop reading ability, the sources of knowledge that underlie that development, and what we can do to support it through intelligent changes in the environment. This includes more formal educational experiences, like instruction, but also less formal ones, like through choosing books to read with kids. My interests in learning relate back to my experiences as an elementary school teacher for kids with reading challenges, which was my profession prior to starting work in psychology.

In addition to doing research on learning, language, and reading, I also try to communicate about the relevance of my science in educational contexts. See here and here for more of that.

I did graduate work in Psychology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, where I studied language and learning, mostly in the context of reading development. At UW-Madison I worked in the Language and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory with Mark Seidenberg. I had the great opportunity to be a Fellow in the Interdisciplinary Training Program in Education Sciences at UW-Madison, a training program at Wisconsin dedicated to the education sciences, which in my time there focused on issues of research and practice in education.


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