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Early Childhood Education  »  People of ECE »  ECE Faculty Information »  Mona W. Matthews, Ph.D.

Mona W. Matthews, Ph.D.

Professor
Co-Director, Collaborative Master's Program

Room: 550 COE
Phone: (404) 413-8225
Email: rmatthews@gsu.edu


Georgia State University
P.O. Box 3978
Atlanta, GA. 30302-3980


EDUCATION:

  • Ph.D., University of Georgia, 1987 
  • M.Ed., Georgia State University, 1977 
  • B.S.E., Georgia State University, 1975 


MAJOR AREAS OF INTEREST:

  • Children's interactions during peer-only literacy events
  • Meaning construction in emergent literacy learners 

BIO 

Dr. Mona Matthews is a former preschool and elementary teacher. She also worked as an educational consultant for Harper & Row Publishers.  As a member of the graduate faculty at Georgia State University, Dr. Matthews works with doctoral students to prepare them for their future roles as teacher educators and researchers.  She co-directs with Dr. Lynn Hart the Collaborative Master’s Program, a unique graduate program guided by principles of constructivist learning theory.  Dr. Matthews’ publications describing this work have appeared in several national journals including Language Arts, Action in Teacher Education, and The Journal of Professional Studies. 

As a researcher, Dr. Matthews studies children’s interactions during peer-only literacy events. This work explores issues related to children’s social, literacy, and individual development and how these converge when children work with others to perform literacy activities. Dr. Matthews’ published work in this area has appeared in several national journals including Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Literacy Research, Literacy Research and Instruction, and The Reading Teacher. Recently, she expanded her interest in children’s interactions with others to gain insights into possible precursors to text comprehension. In 2009, Dr. Matthews, along with colleague Caitlin Dooley, completed a three-year longitudinal study of 38 children who were two-years old at the start of the study and five years old at its conclusion. Publications describing this work have appeared in Journal of Early Childhood Literacy and the Conference Yearbook of the Literacy Research Association.

In 1997, Dr. Matthews, along with Dr. John Kesner, were recipients of the Elva Knight Research Grant Award from the International Reading Association for promising research in the field of reading.  Additionally, she has served on the editorial review boards for Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Literacy Research, Literacy Research and Instruction and the conference yearbooks of Literacy Research Association, Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers, and the American Reading Forum. Dr. Matthews is Past President of the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers.