Read to Succeed

Sharon Speas has spent more than two decades working at the intersection of reading instruction, cognitive psychology, and academic support. She holds a master's degree in Reading Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed additional graduate work in Cognitive Science at Teachers College, Columbia University. For twelve years, she directed the Learning Support Center at a large public university, where she and her team developed evidence-based reading and study programs that served over eight thousand students annually. The system presented in this book emerged directly from that work—refined through thousands of consultations with students struggling to navigate the reading demands of college-level coursework.

Speas has trained faculty members across disciplines to integrate reading comprehension instruction into their courses, worked extensively with student-athletes and first-generation college students, and developed early-intervention programs that helped identify and support struggling readers before their first semester of college. She has presented at national conferences including the College Reading and Learning Association (CRLA) and the National Association for Developmental Education (NADE), and her research on metacognitive reading strategies has appeared in the *Journal of College Reading and Learning*. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Educational Psychology at the University of Georgia, where her dissertation research examines the role of self-explanation in comprehension monitoring among undergraduate students.

Speas lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she continues to work directly with students and to develop new resources for educators. *Read to Succeed* is her first book. When she is not reading about reading, she is usually reading novels by Barbara Kingsolver, hiking the trails of the North Carolina Piedmont, or attempting to keep up with her two school-age children, who have taught her more about how people learn than any research study ever could.

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