Maureen Lovett

Associate Director of the Haskins Global Literacy Hub

Phone: 416-813-6329 (Naomi Badger)

Email: mwl@sickkids.ca

Dr. Maureen W. Lovett is a Professor Emerita in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Toronto and Senior Scientist Emerita in the Research Institute of the Hospital for Sick Children. She has contributed to learning disabilities research and practice for four decades and was one of the first researchers to conduct randomized controlled trials of the efficacy of interventions for dyslexia. She is known internationally for her research on interventions for children and youth with reading disorders.

Maureen Lovett’s research program focused primarily on the study of reading problems in childhood and adolescence. She conducted research creating and evaluating interventions for children and teens with severe reading disabilities. In these treatment outcome studies, she and long-time colleagues, Robin Morris and Maryanne Wolf, asked what constitutes effective intervention for reading- related learning problems, what intervention factors facilitate generalization and maintenance of a positive response, and what diagnostic factors predict intervention response and subsequent outcomes. Over 40 years, her research has been supported by NICHD and IES, as well as by provincial and federal granting agencies in Canada.

From 2009-2011, Dr. Lovett served on a National Academies of Science (NRC) Learning Sciences Panel undertaking a study of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, with the NRC report published in 2012. During this experience, she became interested in the problems faced by adult struggling readers and the issues involved in developing effective literacy interventions for them. Subsequently, she served as a Co-Principal Investigator of The Center for the Study of Adult literacy (CSAL) at Georgia State University. She was particularly involved in developing the content of the reading interventions designed for CSAL adult learners, to deal with both the decoding and comprehension struggles they experienced.

Since 2006, her research has included a substantial knowledge translation and dissemination effort. The evidence-based reading interventions developed by Lovett and her group in Toronto, now the EmpowerTM Reading and Learning Group, have been rolled out to train > 6,000 teachers and help more than 100,000 struggling readers in elementary, middle, and high schools in school boards across Canada, as well as in parts of the US and India.