Deborah Speece, Ph.D.
NCSER Commissioner

Deborah Speece is a national leader in special education research and response to intervention strategies who is known for her innovative studies of the classification and diagnosis of learning disabilities.  For the past 27 years, Speece has served on the faculty in the College of Education at the University of Maryland where she is a professor in the Department of Special Education. The former co-editor of Learning Disabilities Research & Practice and Associate Editor of the American Educational Research Journal, Speece served on NCSER’s Technical Working Group for the Evaluation of Response to Intervention Strategies in Elementary Reading and on expert review panels for IES grant applications. A former educator in the Toledo, Ohio public schools, Speece has also taught children with learning and behavioral disabilities and she has served as the Coordinator of Early Childhood programs for the Children's Resource Center in Bowling Green, Ohio.  Speece is the co-editor of two books, Research on Classroom Ecologies: Implications for Inclusion of Children with Learning Disabilities and Developmental Perspectives on Children with High-Incidence Disabilities. She served on the editorial board of eight scholarly research journals including Exceptional Children, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, and Contemporary Educational Psychology. In 2003 she won the School Psychology Review's Outstanding Article of the Year Award. A Fellow of the International Academy of Research in Learning Disabilities, Speece received her B.S. and M.Ed. in special education from Bowling Green State University and her Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.