Colby Hall

Colby Hall studies literacy development, assessment, and instruction. Her research focuses on the components of effective literacy instruction for elementary and middle-school students with or at risk for literacy-learning difficulties; inference instruction as a means of improving reading comprehension; reading instruction for bilingual/multilingual students with reading difficulties; instruction supporting text comprehension in content-area classrooms; and technology-delivered reading instruction.

Hall is currently the principal investigator (PI) on the Office of Special Education Programs-funded “AERO ELs” project, which seeks to adapt the Accelerating Early Reading Outcomes (AERO) small-group reading intervention so that it better meets the needs of primary grade Spanish-speaking emergent bilingual students at risk for reading difficulties. She is also PI on the Institute of Education Sciences-funded “Project LINK,” which aims to further develop and pilot test a knowledge-building, inference instruction intervention for middle schoolers. She is Co-PI or Co-I on a number of other U.S. Department of Education, National Institutes of Health, and Virginia Department of Education-funded projects that seek to improve literacy outcomes for students.

Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 2016
M.A., Teachers College, Columbia University, 2007
A.B., Harvard College, Harvard University, 2002

Curriculum Vitae

• Reading assessment
• Word reading and spelling instruction for elementary students with or at risk for dyslexia
• Language comprehension instruction to support reading comprehension for elementary and middle-school students with or at risk for reading comprehension difficulties 
• Reading instruction for emergent bilingual students with reading difficulties
• Instruction supporting text comprehension in content-area classrooms
• Technology-delivered reading instruction