Associate Professor
(Ph.D. 1992, University of Colorado, Boulder)
FedEX Building, Rm. 403c
Office Phone: 901-678-3803
FAX: 901-678-2579
email:d.mcnamara@mail.psyc.memphis.edu
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Danielle S. McNamara (Ph.D. 1992, University of Colorado, Boulder) joined the Cognitive Psychology Program at the University of Memphis in August, 2002. As a cognitive scientist, a great deal of her work involves the theoretical study of cognitive processes as well as the application of cognitive principles to educational practice. The majority of her current research concerns text comprehension. One focus of that research (funded by NSF IERI) examines the effects of students’ reading strategies on science course performance. The overarching goal of the IERI project is to develop methods to improve students’ use of reading strategies. To that end, she and her research team have developed an automated reading strategy tutor called iSTART, which teaches students to more actively process science text. A second focus of her reading research is on text cohesion and how that interacts with reader aptitudes. A current project (funded by IES) examines effects of text coherence and is working to create automated measures of text difficulty (called Coh-Metrix). She also studies a variety of phenomena related to comprehension skill, working memory, ATC to pilot communication, expertise, knowledge acquisition, and the generation effect.