Ana Taboada Barber serves as Professor in the Department of Counseling, Higher Education and Special Education. Ana studies reading comprehension from a cognitive and motivational perspective. Her work centers on studying the influence of specific motivational variables (e.g., autonomy support, self-efficacy) and cognitive variables (e.g., executive function skills; inference making) on the literacy and language development of elementary and middle school students. She studies reading comprehension within classroom instructional contexts as well as an individual difference variable. As a former English as a Second Language teacher in full language immersion settings, Ana's work in reading comprehension development is principally concentrated within the population of Emergent Bilinguals within the United States. More recently, she has extended her focus to include Spanish-speaking students in South American countries.