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Department
Special Education
Office Location
416E MRL
Mailing Address
Peabody #228
230 Appleton Place
Nashville, TN 37203-5721
Direct Phone
615-343-6686
Fax Number
615-343-1570
Email Address
Karen R. Harris
Professor and Currey Ingram Chair in Special Education
Ed.D., Auburn University, 1981
Karen R. Harris, Currey Ingram Professor of Special Education and Literacy, has worked in the field of education for over 30 years. She has taught kindergarten and fourth grade, as well as elementary and secondary students with hearing impairments, ADHD, learning disabilities, and behavioral/emotional difficulties. Dr. Harris's research focuses on theoretical and intervention issues in the development of academic and self-regulation strategies among students who are at-risk and those with severe learning challenges such as learning disabilities and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Karen Harris and Steve Graham developed the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model of strategies instruction. SRSD has been most extensively researched in the area of writing, although researchers have also addressed applications in reading, math, and homework. Over 40 studies of the SRSD model of instruction for developing self-regulated writing strategies have been reported, involving students with and without disabilities from the elementary grades through high school; strategies for a variety of genres, including personal narratives, story writing, persuasive essays, report writing, expository essays, and state writing tests; entire classes, small groups, and individual instruction; instruction delivered by special and/or general education teachers in their own classrooms, often as part of writers’ workshop; and researchers independent of Harris, Graham, and their colleagues.
SRSD has resulted in improvements in four main aspects of students’ performance: quality of writing, knowledge of writing, approach to writing, and attitudes/self-efficacy. Across a variety of strategies and genres, the quality, length, and structure of students’ compositions have improved; improvements have been documented in planning, revising, content, and mechanics. These improvements have been consistently maintained for the majority of students over time, and students have shown generalization across settings, persons, and writing media. SRSD for writing was recently recognized as a validated evidence-based practice by the Office of Special Education Programs, and as having the strongest impact of any strategies instruction approach in writing in Writing Next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescent middle and high school, Commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation, http://www.all4ed.org/publications/WritingNext/WritingNext.pdf. Online interactive tutorials are available at http://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu. For strategy instruction see http://www.unl.edu/csi/. And materials can be found for Project Write at http://hobbs.vanderbilt.edu/projectwrite/ .
Author of over 200 publications, Professor Harris contributes to the leading journals in special education, general education, and educational psychology. Former editor of the Journal of Educational Psychology, she is co-editor of the American Psychological Association Educational Psychology Handbook currently in preparation. She is co-author or co-editor of several books, including Powerful Writing Strategies for All Students; Writing Better: Effective Strategies for Teaching Students with Learning Difficulties; and the Handbook of Research in Learning Disabilities.
Nationally, she has served as president of the Division for Research of the Council for Exceptional Children, as an officer for the American Educational Research Association, and as a consultant for local, state, national, and international organizations. She and Steve Graham received the Distinguished Researcher Award for special education research from the American Educational Research Association, and the Career Research Award from the International Council for Exceptional Children. She has been recognized as author of a classic article in special education (published in Exceptional Children in 1991), and author of the best review/theoretical paper in Learning Disabilities Research and Practice in 2003.