Andrea Rizzo is a research associate at CCT, where she contributes to the Portable Wordplay project involving literacy game development for middle-school struggling readers and to Possible Worlds, the five-year research effort to develop a series of game-based activities that can aid middle-school science and literacy instruction. She also recently co-lead the evaluation of an e3 learning project for the Ulster County BOCES, evaluating training and support provided to teachers as they developed fully on-line and hybrid courses for middle-school and high-school students.

Dr. Rizzo recently facilitated an evaluation of the usefulness of existing digital media (interactive games and videos) in early childhood classrooms for literacy and math instruction for the Ready to Learn (RTL) project, and is currently facilitating the development and distribution of a survey of parents for RTL as well as participating in the evaluation of children's use of transgaming materials.

Dr. Rizzo is an applied developmental psychologist focusing on language development of children at risk for language and reading difficulties. Her dissertation mapped the trajectories of children's language development from 1-year-old to Kindergarten, and investigated how predictors in three domains - sociodemographic, social-emotional, and home language exposure - influenced expressive and receptive language growth in unique ways. She received her Ph.D. from Fordham University, where she contributed to a variety of research projects including exploring components of Pre-K through 3rd-grade alignment and related academic and social-emotional outcomes. Additionally, she held a year-long internship at the National Center for Children in Poverty as part of the Research Connections group.

Dr. Rizzo received her Master's in applied developmental psychology from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and her Bachelor's of Arts degree in Psychology from Yale University, where she also completed the teacher preparation program and is a certificate Birth-Kindergarten teacher. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the Language Diversity and Literacy Development Research Group, where she was the project coordinator for the evaluation of a middle-school academic language intervention. She also led a study of the oral language skills of language-minority children in urban middle schools, as well as an evaluation of the effects of a preschool home literacy program for use in low-income communities.