Thomas Allen

Research Interests:

Visual Language and Learning

Thomas Allen is the VL2 Center Director. He holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Educational Foundations and Research, where he teaches courses in statistics and research design. Dr. Allen recently completed a 9-year tenure as Dean of the Graduate School at Gallaudet. Prior to becoming Dean, Dr. Allen was the Director of the Gallaudet Research Institute, where he conducted or supervised many large-scale statistical studies of the deaf population in the United States. These included an annual survey of deaf and hard of hearing children and youth and two national efforts to develop norms for standardized achievement tests for the population of deaf and hard of hearing students. He designed and conducted studies of national patterns of classroom communication strategies for deaf and hard of hearing students, and a longitudinal study of school to work transition for students who are deaf. As the Dean of the Graduate School, Dr. Allen implemented Ph.D. programs in Linguistics and Audiology, an Au.D. professional doctorate in Audiology, a Masters of Arts in Teaching that focuses on preparing teachers to work in bilingual ASL-English environments, a Master of Arts degree in International Development, and a Master of Arts degree in Deaf Studies. As part of his VL2 work, Dr. Allen co-directs the Early Education Longitudinal Study and the Psychometric evaluations of the VL2 Toolkit instruments.