Education: BA, Yale University, 1990; MA, University of Colorado, 1996; PhD, University of Washington, 2004. At SPU since 2004.
Scott Beers has been at Seattle Pacific since 2004, after receiving his PhD in education from the University of Washington. Dr. Beers first became interested in education while teaching a freshman composition class as a graduate student in English literature. Why did these otherwise successful students struggle so much with writing? How had they been taught, and how should they have been taught? His interest in writing development and literacy instruction increased while teaching at a school for children with reading and writing disabilities, as he saw the academic and emotional effects poor literacy skills had on these students. Currently, Dr. Beers’ teaching and research focus broadly upon literacy instruction. As Chair of Seattle Pacific’s Masters in Literacy program, Dr. Beers primarily teaches graduate-level courses to current teachers working to deepen their knowledge of literacy development and to hone their instruction. His research has recently focused on writing development, and as of 2011, Dr. Beers has been collaborating with an NIH-funded research team to learn more about identifying and remediating writing disabilities. Dr. Beers grew up in the Seattle area, and he loves taking his family on outdoor adventures in the Pacific Northwest.
Selected Publications
- Abbott, R., Mickail, T., Richards, T., Renninger, A., Hidi, S. E., Beers, S., & Berninger, V. (2017). Understanding interest and self-efficacy in the reading and writing of students with persisting specific learning disabilities during middle childhood and early adolescence. International Journal of Educational Methodology, 3, 41-64.
- Beers, S. F., Mickail, T., Abbott, R., & Berninger, V. (2017). Effects of transcription ability and transcription mode on translation: Evidence from written compositions, language bursts and pauses when students in grades 4 to 9, with and without persisting dyslexia or dysgraphia, compose by pen or by keyboard. Journal of Writing Research, 9, 1-25.
- Yagle, K., Richards, T., Askren, K., Mestre, Z., Beers, S., Abbott, R., Nagy, W., & Berninger, V. (2017). Relationships between eye movements during sentence reading comprehension, word spelling and reading, and DTI and fMRI connectivity in students with and without dysgraphia or dyslexia. Journal of Systems and Integrated Neuroscience, 3(1), 1-11.
- Gritter, K., Beers, S., & Knaus, R. W. (2013). Teacher scaffolding of academic language in an advanced placement U.S. history class. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 56, 409-418.
- Beers, S. F., & Nagy, W. (2011). “Writing Development in Four Genres From Grades Three to Seven: Syntactic Complexity and Genre Differentiation.” Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 24, 183-202.
- Berninger, V.W., Nagy, W., & Beers, S. F. (2011). “Developing Writers’ Sentence and Syntactic Awareness: Constructing and Combining Sentences.” Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 24, 151-182.
- Beers, S. F., Quinlan, T., & Harbaugh, G. (2010). “Adolescent Students’ Reading During Writing Behaviors and Relationships With Text Quality: An Eyetracking Study.” Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 23, 743-775.
- Beers, S. F., & Nagy, W. (2009). “Syntactic Complexity as a Predictor of Adolescent Writing Quality: Which Measures? Which Genre?” Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 22, 185-200.
Please view Dr. Beers’ CV (PDF) for additional publications.