Dr. Tiffany Peltier is the Director of Professional Learning at Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA). She will be a featured speaker at the 2025 Iowa Science of Reading Summit. 

Iowa Reading Research Center (IRRC): Tell Me a Bit More About Who You Are and What You Do.

Tiffany Peltier: I started out teaching first grade, pre-K, and kindergarten in a few different states in private and public schools. And then I did my master's at Texas A & M, and I had the opportunity to teach there after my master's in undergraduate reading and literacy coursework for pre-service teachers. And I learned a lot through that teaching experience and seeing how pre-service teachers learn something in the classroom or learn something at the university, then they go into a classroom and may see something completely different. And they're trying to really understand how those two things fit together. 

I did my doctorate then in learning science and special education at the University of Oklahoma, and I taught in their learning science and special education programs as well. And I got to study Conceptual Change Theory there. I learned more about how people come to their understanding of something and how that understanding might change based on information that they're receiving, especially around misconceptions. 

So now I work for NWEA. I joined them in 2022 as a researcher, and I worked on dyslexia and early literacy. And I moved into the position of professional learning. I was able to more directly impact classrooms by developing some professional learning on the science of teaching reading. That's what I do now. 

IRRC: Can You Tell Me More About Your Current Research?

Tiffany Peltier: Yeah. So right now, a lot of my research is around how we're doing in effectively translating research to practice. It's so important to do research that is peer reviewed and goes into a journal and adds to the knowledge base. We know that we have this huge knowledge base that then isn't getting to the teachers a lot of times. And so, developing that professional learning that directly translates research findings is something I've been working on for the past few years, and now we're trying to measure the effect of that on leaders and teachers that are receiving it. 

IRRC: Some of Your Previous Research Has Examined Misconceptions Around Dyslexia. What Is the Most Common Misconception Educators Have About Dyslexia According to Your Research?

Tiffany Peltier: The most common misconceptions all fall under that category of visual difficulties. So in one of my research studies, we looked at a bunch of items that we have given education professionals to assess their understanding of dyslexia. And we ran an exploratory factor analysis thinking that [the items] would fall into categories, like, assessment, characteristics, intervention, etc. But, really, they all loaded into two broad categories: whether it was connected to a visual misconception or whether it wasn't. And by visual, I mean items that asked about flipping numbers, seeing letters or words backwards, or if dyslexia font that might help students with dyslexia learn to read better. Looking at the data showed us that even though educators may be receiving professional learning on dyslexia, if it doesn’t directly address misconceptions; these misconceptions are very sticky, because anything that has to do with vision is really stemming from a misunderstanding of dyslexia.

IRRC: Why Is Conceptual Change So Important When Challenging Misconceptions Like This?

Tiffany Peltier: Dyslexia is the most commonly misunderstood learning disability. And we have a ton of research dating back to the early 2000s showing that not only teachers have these misconceptions, but school psychologists, administrators, and even teacher educators—professors at universities—do as well. So, if the general public holds these misconceptions and pre-service teachers going through universities are getting taught by professors who have these misconceptions as well, there's nowhere that they're getting debunked. 

And so in order to do that, I thought we could apply research from conceptual change—it’s an area of research that originated out of science education, but it's now been applied across fields and content areas to help people understand commonly misunderstood things. And what they find is that if you have a misconception, in order to replace it with a scientific conception, you have to first be dissatisfied with your current conception. And then the new conception has to be intelligible, plausible, and it has to be fruitful for your work. So through conceptual change practices, we can help people better understand why those misconceptions are not true.

IRRC: Some of Your Previous Work Also Has Focused on Math Instruction. What Similarities and Differences Have You Observed During Your Work With Mathematics and Literacy Instruction?

Tiffany Peltier: I think that's a really interesting question because there's so much emphasis on the science of reading. Unfortunately, math instruction was largely left out of that discussion. And because of that, there are still a lot of people who might be confused on what is the best method to teach math in the classroom. And I remember as a teacher, following a curriculum, I didn't really have training in how to set up problems or explain problems in ways that were helpful or beneficial to kids. So I think it's really important that the word does get out on mathematics instruction because, just like literacy, explicit instruction matters. Fluency matters. 

I would say that a good rule of thumb for anyone trying to learn about the science behind math is comparing it to reading. If you think about word recognition skills being foundational so that students can access the language underneath—think about math facts in that same way. They need to be automatic so that students can access what they’re learning. But that doesn't mean, just like in reading, that comprehension, or a deeper, more conceptual understanding of what is going on isn't important. And so, any subject you're working with, teaching explicitly during that acquisition phase is the most important thing so that then [students] can build fluency and generalize. And once they've built fluency with something, then they can use that to think and problem solve. And that's when you give them those complex problems. 

IRRC: What Does the “Science of Reading” Mean to You?

Tiffany Peltier: There's two different [meanings of] “science of reading,” I think. There's one that's the movement—the science of reading movement. It kind of turns into this long game of telephone. So what I mean by that is the science of reading is broadly defined as all of this research we have from multiple fields, interventions, special education, neuroscience, and learning trends around how reading happens and how we can best teach students to read. But then, you know, those [studies] a lot of time stay behind paywalls unless they're translated. And sometimes that translation takes multiple iterations. And if you remember the game of telephone from being a kid, sometimes that's what happens. It gets changed and morphed by the time it actually gets to the teacher, the pre-service teacher, or the state law or policy. So, a lot of times, the movement is still overlapping with the actual science of reading, but it's not exactly the same. And we have to be careful that we're not just following a movement that's going to be swinging a pendulum in one direction and not moving the needle on outcomes.