Suzanne M. Swiderski completed her undergraduate studies in English and political science at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin. After deciding to become a post-secondary educator, she attended Loyola University Chicago, in Chicago, Illinois, where she earned both a Master of Arts degree in English, with a concentration in composition and rhetoric, and a Master of Education degree in educational psychology, with a concentration in developmental education. Following the receipt of these degrees, she spent two years teaching humanities, literature, and writing courses at Heartland Community College in Bloomington, Illinois, and five years teaching first-year experience and writing courses, as well as directing the campus writing center, at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. She returned to graduate school at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, where she earned her Doctor of Philosophy degree in Psychological and Quantitative Foundations of Education (Educational Psychology). Currently, she teaches an undergraduate course in educational psychology and a graduate course in research methods.
Dr. Swiderski's dissertation research explored the validity of several approaches for assessing secondary students’ thinking through their writing, from the traditional methods of holistic and analytic assessment to newly developed methods based on the psychological theory of mental models and the linguistic theory of systemic functional grammar. The next stage of her research in this area will involve examining additional writing assessments to determine whether her initial findings are replicable with other assessment instruments as well as different student populations. However, she is also interested in exploring the utility of offering high school students opportunities to prepare for writing assessments by familiarizing them with helpful metacognitive strategies and providing them with occasions for practice and feedback