NASHUA – Nashua resident Dr. Lorraine Dagostino, a professor in the School of Education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, recently won the Northeast Educational Research Association fall 2013 conference Lorne H. Woollatt distinguished paper award.

The conference was held in Rocky Hill, Conn., with more than 500 researchers presenting papers.

The paper was co-authored with fellow University of Massachusetts Lowell faculty member Dr. James Carifio; Dr. Mark Fenster, of the Notre Dame of Maryland University; and Dr. Michael Deasy, a special education teacher in the Athol-Royalston Regional School District in Massachusetts.

As part of the award, the group was invited to present the paper at the national conference of the American Educational Research Association in Philadelphia.

The paper, “Developing Basic and Higher Level Reading Processing Skills: Exploring Reading Instruction with the PIRLS Database,” was done to advance research on comparative international literacy. The study focused on the concern over worldwide literacy rates, which prompted the United Nations to establish the UN Literacy Decade (2003-12), with one area of focus being to provide support to schools to develop effective literacy programs.