Deborah Speece (Ph.D. ’84), commissioner with the National Center for Special Education Research, will visit the School of Education on Nov. 2, meeting with faculty and
graduate students to discuss funding and career opportunities with the Institute of Education Sciences.
At a session to begin at 10 a.m., Speece will discuss IES grant programs, including initiatives from the IES’s National Center for Special Education Research and the National Center for Education Research. She will describe the history of and funding patterns for NCSER, as well as provide an overview of the application and review process. That talk will take place in Peabody Hall, Room 02.
Speece will also hold an open session with doctoral students to discuss their post-graduation interests and early career opportunities at IES. That session will take begin at 2 p.m. in Peabody Hall, Room 212.
While serving with the NCSER, Speece is on leave from the University of Maryland where she is a professor of special education in the College of Education. She served as the co-editor of Learning Disabilities Research & Practice and as associate editor of the American Educational Research Journal and on numerous editorial boards for special education and educational psychology journals.
A former educator in the Toledo, Ohio, public schools, Speece has also taught children with learning and behavioral disabilities and she has served as the coordinator of early childhood programs for the Children’s Resource Center in Bowling Green, Ohio.
Her program of research centers on classification issues in learning disabilities, children at risk of developing reading disabilities, and response to intervention from assessment and intervention perspectives and has been supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in special education from Bowling Green State University and her doctorate in educational psychology from UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Education.