The Judith A. Langer Doctoral Fellowship for Education in Schools and Society will provide support for the School of Education at the University at Albany to recruit and retain doctoral-level students. Make a gift to the Langer Fellowship.

Judith A. Langer is an internationally acclaimed scholar in literacy learning and has had a strong worldwide impact on theory, policy, and practice. Her groundbreaking studies since 1980 explain essential differences in the strategies we use to make sense of literature and informational experiences and provide underlying theory as well as guidelines for the different kinds of learning, instruction, and assessment practices appropriate to each.  The “sociocognitive theory” she developed in the early 1980s underlies all her work on learning and instruction and is based on the belief that who the students are and what they have experienced both in and out of school lead us to expect differences in interpretation that, when discussed in cognitively engaged and collaborative classrooms, lead to enriched understandings for all.  Among her many notable awards, Langer was honored by Lund University as one of 12 of the world’s “Imaginative Scientists” and received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University in Sweden.  She is a recipient of the ILA Albert J. Harris award for research on teaching students with reading difficulties and the NCTE David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English for “Envisioning Knowledge,” one of her 13 books. She was inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame in 2002.