Elizabeth Tighe

Elizabeth Tighe is an associate professor in developmental psychology. She is also affiliated faculty with the Research on the Challenges of Acquiring Language and Literacy Initiative and the Adult Literacy Research Center at Georgia State University. Prior to joining the GSU faculty, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute for the Science of Teaching and Learning at Arizona State University. She also completed an Institute of Education Sciences Pre-Doctoral Interdisciplinary Training (PIRT) Fellowship through the Florida Center for Reading Research in conjunction with her doctoral studies at Florida State University.

Her research is interdisciplinary and lies at the intersection of cognitive, developmental, and educational psychology. Her primary focus is to advance our understanding of the literacy skills and instructional needs of struggling adult readers who attend Adult Basic and Secondary Education programs. She is also interested in applying innovative and rigorous research designs and statistical methodologies to the field of educational research. Her current projects include examining the role of component skills, with a particular emphasis on metalinguistic skills, to the larger context of adults’ reading comprehension abilities utilizing a range of statistical techniques and eyetracking equipment. A future, direct extension of this work will be to develop and pilot an intervention targeting metalinguistic skills in adult literacy classrooms.