Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively

Jill Fitzgerald, Ph.D., is a research profes-

sor and professor emerita at the University 

of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Distin-

guished Research Scientist at MetaMetrics in 

Durham, North Carolina. Her current inter-

ests center on writing for English learners, 

text complexity, and reading vocabulary. 

Dr. Fitzgerald has published more than 100 

works and has been an invited speaker 

at national and international research and 

professional conferences. Her articles have 

appeared extensively in a wide range of 

top-tier research and practitioner journals, 

including Reading Research Quarterly, Journal 

of Educational Psychology, Research in the 

Teaching of English, Cognition and Instruction, 

Discourse Processes, Review of Educational 

Research, Educational Researcher, American 

Educational Research Journal, The Phi Delta 

Kappan, and The Reading Teacher. She is 

currently an associate editor for the Journal 

of Educational Psychology and serves on the 

editorial boards of several national and inter-

national journals. Dr. Fitzgerald is a member 

of the Reading Hall of Fame and an American 

Educational Research Association (AERA) 

fellow. She has won the AERA Outstanding 

Review of Research Award and the Interna-

tional Reading Association’s Dina Feitelson 

Award for Research. She has been a review 

panelist for the Office of Education, IES, the 

National Institutes of Health, and the National 

Institute for Literacy.