UNC School of Education

>> Fitzgerald, Jill

Jill Fitzgerald’s research spans more than a quarter of a century and has resulted in more than 80 works. The early stage of her career through the 70s and 80s was marked by a progression of investigations beginning with the mental processes individuals use as they read and write followed by studies of how children could be taught to use those mental processes. The late 80s and early 90s were characterized by two significant turns: She studied the meanings of different epistemological outlooks ─ world views on what counts as knowledge and how people get or create it ─ and applied her epistemological learning to ways of thinking about reading and writing processes and instruction.  Focusing primarily on writing processes, Fitzgerald studied the use of revision in writing as an exemplar for study from different epistemological stances. Her study of epistemologies also made an impact on her research methodological expertise by broadening her earlier quantitative understandings to incorporate greater facility with qualitative methods. 

Next, she became deeply interested in how bilingual and English-language learners learn to read and write in a new language. After considerable study of second-language learning in general, she produced an American Educational Research Association award-winning research review of the cognitive processes involved in English-language learners’ English reading in the United States. That work laid the foundation for a series of studies examining the cognitive development of young English-language learners’ English literacy development, especially in relation to instruction.  During this time, Fitzgerald took a one-year reassignment from the University to be a full-time first-grade teacher in a neighboring school district where half of her students were Latino.  Several research and other scholarly articles were written from data collected during her reassignment, one of which, with George Noblit, won the International Reading Association Outstanding Research Award. 

Her current research projects address questions about young Latino students’ English reading growth in relation to their oral English and Spanish abilities and their reading growth across two years as compared to native English-speaking peers.  She also studies whether the structure of interventions to assist teachers in reforming their classroom reading instruction matters for students’ learning about reading and whether the amount of monetary support given to schools for reading reform efforts matters. A keen interest in mentoring doctoral students and assuring that her research results are written for both researcher and practitioner audiences are hallmarks of her career.