Rate My Professor Thushara Anandakumar

Thushara Anandakumar serves as an Academic Casual in the Macquarie School of Education, a member of the Macquarie University Centre for Reading, and an Adjunct Fellow in the School of Psychological Sciences at Macquarie University. She holds a Bachelor of Psychology (Honours) completed in 2008 and a Master of Clinical Neuropsychology completed in 2014, both from Macquarie University, and is a registered psychologist. Since 2009, she has been involved in reading research and remediation, accumulating over ten years of experience working with children and adolescents, including those with reading difficulties, autism, and acquired brain injuries.

Her research specializations encompass cognitive aspects of reading acquisition and disorders, with a focus on dyslexia, phonics and sight word training, nonword reading assessments, and belief-bias reasoning in delusion-prone individuals. Key publications include 'Sight Word and Phonics Training in Children With Dyslexia' (McArthur, Castles, Kohnen, Larsen, Jones, Anandakumar, & Banales, 2015), which investigated training interventions for irregular word reading; 'Phonics training for English-speaking poor readers' (McArthur et al., 2018), a Cochrane review assessing phonics efficacy; 'Do nonword reading tests for children measure what we want them to? An analysis of year 2 error responses' (Castles, Polito, Pritchard, Anandakumar, & Coltheart, 2018), examining test validity; 'Belief-bias reasoning in non-clinical delusion-prone individuals' (Anandakumar, Connaughton, Coltheart, & Langdon, 2017), studying reasoning processes; and contributions to tools like the Test of Everyday Reading Comprehension (TERC; McArthur, Jones, Anandakumar, Castles, Larsen, & Coltheart, 2013) and the Test of Orthographic Choice (TOC; Kohnen, Anandakumar, McArthur, & Castles). She has co-authored 13 research outputs, primarily in cognitive science and education. Anandakumar has worked on projects affiliated with the Department of Cognitive Science and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders. She also serves as Team Lead (Assessment) at the Australian Literacy Clinic, Faculty of Education and Arts, Australian Catholic University, conducting literacy assessments and interventions.