Dr. Alley’s research focuses on furthering our understanding of, and improving on the opportunities youth have for language and literacy learning, including strategies promoting language and literacy proficiency and academic success across disciplines. She is interested in exploring youths’ literate and social practices situated in school and popular culture, and the environments that sustain literacy and motivation growth. Within this construct, Dr. Alley has identified two broad research goals: (1) investigating pre-service and in-service teachers beliefs, knowledge, and dispositions toward literacy pedagogy and the Common Core State Standards; and, (2) writing development and instruction across disciplines, including multimodality and multiliteracies.
