A former elementary school teacher, she specializes in language and literacy development and instruction, and she focuses on children with learning differences and children from low-income and English-learning backgrounds. Rebecca is the principal investigator of a federally-funded research project on investigating the vocabulary and comprehension development of monolingual- and Spanish-speaking bilingual children in grades 2 through 5, and another federally-funded research project on developing a cross-age peer tutoring program for vocabulary and comprehension with English learners and their non-English learning peers.