Faculty/Staff/PhD

Lindsey Peters-Sanders, Ph.D.

Dr. Lindsey Peters-Sanders

Lindsey Peters-Sanders, Ph.D.

Research Assistant Professor

Phone: (813) 974-3596
Office: MHC 2501

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Lindsey A. Peters-Sanders, PhD is a Research Assistant Professor in the College of Behavioral & Community Sciences at the 最新天美传媒. Her long-term research goal is to understand the factors that contribute to academic vocabulary acquisition and its role in early literacy development, with the goal of improving reading comprehension and long-term academic outcomes. Her work focuses on early childhood education, with a particular emphasis on preschool, as it is a critical period for language growth and vocabulary development.

Dr. Peters-Sanders鈥� research bridges education and speech-language pathology to understand how instructional practices and assessment systems work together to support children鈥檚 literacy development. She integrates intervention science with advanced data analysis to translate complex information about children鈥檚 word learning into tools that educators can use in real-world settings. By studying the instructional, linguistic, and environmental factors that influence vocabulary acquisition, she aims to design interventions that are empirically grounded, instructionally meaningful, and feasible for widespread implementation.

Dr. Peters-Sanders currently serves as a Co-Investigator on a federally funded project evaluating Story Friends, a supplemental vocabulary curriculum for preschoolers. Her work has been supported by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and her findings have been published in leading journals such as the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research and the Journal of Early Intervention.

Education
PhD, Communication Sciences & Disorders 最新天美传媒 2019
MAT, Exceptional Student Education, K-12 最新天美传媒 2013
BA, Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences 最新天美传媒 2005

Teaching

IDS 2600 Research in Community Settings: Promoting Early Language and Literacy Development

Research Interests

  • Academic vocabulary acquisition in early childhood and its role in later reading comprehension.
  • Translational research bridging education and speech-language pathology to develop practical, evidence-based instructional tools.
  • Modeling how child, home, and classroom factors shape vocabulary development.
  • Designing AI-driven tools to support academic vocabulary instruction and automate assessment.