Susan De La Paz Associate Professor Department of Special Education 1308 Benjamin Building College Park, MD 20742 Voice: 301-405-2153 sdelapaz@umd.edu Specialty Area: Learning Disabilities, Writing, Content Area Instruction

Dr. De La Paz engages in work that crosses the fields of special education, literacy and more recently, history. Her research interests began with a focus on developing and evaluating writing for students with and without learning disabilities. "Most students, even through high school and beyond, are novices when it comes to learning how to compose effectively," she says. "This creates a wonderful opportunity to create instructional programs that benefit all learners, not simply those with school-identified learning problems."

Language has been a passion with De La Paz for as long as she can remember. She started her career as a speech language pathologist working at a hospital rehabilitation unit. "My focus then was talking-the spoken word. Today as a researcher, my focus is on how students interact with written words, and on preparing students to be successful in both academic and societal contexts."

De La Paz's research has benefited both culturally and academically diverse learners. One of the most enduring findings from several of her studies is that after teachers employ her instructional methods, low-performing students and those with disabilities often perform at the same level as their more capable peers had before instruction began. "While students in general become better writers, those who need to learn how to express their ideas in writing the most can do so, sometimes after years of failure in middle and even high school," she says.

Because her research in the area of writing provides students with models of many of the cognitive processes used by expert writers, De La Paz became interested in applying the same type of support to students in the area of historical reasoning. "When historians think about the past, they engage in discipline-specific ways of reasoning-it becomes an open question the extent to which students can learn to do so, given adequate instruction from teachers." To date, Dr. De La Paz has successfully implemented two large intervention studies with middle and high school students in diverse urban classrooms.

Dr. De La Paz joined the faculty this fall after teaching at Santa Clara and Vanderbilt Universities.

Education:  Ph.D., University of Maryland , Special Education
                    M.S., University of Michigan , Speech-Language Pathology
                    B.S., Northwestern University, Learning Disabilities