Janice F. Almasi, Ph.D. is the Carol Lee Robertson Endowed Professor of Literacy Education at the University of Kentucky.  She earned her Ph.D. and M.Ed. in literacy education at the University of Maryland, and her B.S. in Education from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.  She is a former elementary school teacher and literacy specialist, having taught fourth graders and struggling readers in Maryland.  Following her graduate work, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh.  She was the recipient of the International Reading Association's Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award in 1994 and the National Reading Conference's Outstanding Student Research Award in 1993.  

Her pedagogical and research endeavors have critically examined the contexts in which children make sense of text, particularly in peer discussion environments.  Her research has also examined comprehension and the strategic processing that occurs while children read.  She has been the PI or Co-PI on federal research grants totaling $8,814,376 and her research has appeared in journals including: Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Educational Psychology, Journal of Educational Research, Journal of Literacy Research, Elementary School Journal, Educational Psychologist, and Reading Psychology.  She is currently a co-principal investigator on a grant funded by the U. S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, in which she is examining the efficacy of a narrative comprehension intervention designed for elementary students at risk for ADHD who struggle to comprehend.  As well, she is currently the principal investigator on a grant funded by the Kentucky Department of Education in which she is working with a team of nine K-12 teachers to develop two online modules to help teachers learn how to plan for, and implement instruction related to teaching theme and text structure to K-12 students.  She has published several books including Teaching Strategic Processes in Reading, now in its second edition.  She has served as an elected member of the Board of Directors of the International Literacy Association (2008-2011) and the Literacy Research Association (2008-2011).  She also served as President of the Literacy Research Association in 2015.  Most recently, she was elected to the Reading Hall of Fame in 2020, and she served as a member of the Writing Team that revised the Kentucky Academic Standards for Reading and Writing (Kentucky Department of Education, 2019).