Heidi Anne Mesmer

Heidi Anne Mesmer, a professor in literacy education at Virginia Tech, began her career as a second-grade teacher and completed doctoral work in 1999. Mesmer examines the impact of texts on readers’ development and is published in Reading Research Quarterly, The Educational Researcher, Elementary School Journal, and Early Childhood Research Quarterly. Her work is characterized by high-quality pieces that address problems of practice and have policy implications.

Mesmer’s work in the early 2000s examined the impact of decodability on beginning readers, informing a heated national debate. This work expanded to address the full range of textual scaffolds for beginners (e.g., word, sentence, and discourse levels) and culminated in a model of early grades text. A second line of work, motivated by the K–3 text difficulty increases in the Common Core, empirically tested increases on readers and challenged the evidence for claims. Recent work has examined technical limitations of readability formulas and the nature of vocabulary in texts.

Mesmer has been the principal investigator for eight grants aimed at improving K–5 reading instruction, and her work has been supported by the Spencer Foundation/AERA/IES. Her thought leadership has impacted K–5 educators through dozens of blogs, op eds, and six books including Big Words for Young Readers: Teaching Kids in K–5 to Decode—and Understand—Words With Multiple Syllables and Morphemes (Scholastic). Mesmer’s podcasts and webinars have been downloaded or viewed by thousands of educators. She regularly delivers keynotes to schools, state departments of education, non-profits, and educational companies.