Cheryl Lyon, MAT, is a doctoral student and NeXus fellow with a focus on special education and literacy in the department of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education. Her research interests include vocabulary acquisition, the role of background knowledge in reading comprehension, and finding efficient and effective ways to bring about improvement for struggling early and adolescent readers.
She pursued a PhD after years of working with children of all ages, from her early work studying issues of urban education in New York City, to teaching high school English and middle school English language arts in rural and suburban Connecticut. Lyon also worked as an instructional coach with middle school content-area co-teachers on a research project to improve literacy instruction. She earned a BA in English from the College of the Holy Cross and an MAT in secondary English from Rhode Island College. She holds a professional educator certificate in secondary English from the state of Connecticut.