The research will investigate how factors that affect skill learning can be harnessed to improve reading and reading education. Beginning readers must decode letters on the page into the sounds of language. These decoded sounds can then be linked to meaningful ideas and concepts, allowing children to leverage what they know (spoken language) to learn a new skill (reading). Traditionally, decoding was taught as a process of memorizing a large set of rules that translate letters to sounds (e.g., "A" with a silent "E" makes the "long A," as in LATE). However, while rules are clearly an important educational tool, many psychologists now view learning to read as a process of encoding probabilistic relationships between the written letters and the sounds rather than explicit rules. As a result, learning to read may be more like acquiring a skill, like shooting a basketball, than like memorizing a list of rules. It is therefore potentially significant for the instruction of reading that basic research has uncovered several principles that improve skill acquisition.
The proposed studies test these principles in first-graders learning to read by partnering with a private-sector reading-technology company to develop short-term studies in which students learn a handful of decoding skills. To examine the correspondence between reading and skill acquisition, the investigators have also devised a motor task that captures the same kind of probabilistic input-output relationships that are required for decoding in word reading. Thus, the experiments will be run in pairs, and each pair will include a motor experiment and a reading experiment. Within each pair, the investigators will manipulate the ways in which the tasks are presented and observe whether these manipulations produce similar effects on performance across the two experiments.
The study aims to have a broad impact on our understanding of how children learn to read: First, the experiments will test how best to structure learning experiences to teach decoding skills. The findings will have immediate implications for reading instruction, and the project includes opportunities for outreach to educators and policy makers. Reading is a foundational skill, laying the groundwork for the entire school curriculum. Thus, improvements in children's reading ability have the potential for widespread and lasting impact throughout the educational system and into society in general. Second, because reading is an elaborate and nearly universal behavior, it provides an excellent model task for studying human learning generally in a much more complex domain than is typically studied in the laboratory. Uncovering principles common to reading and motor skill acquisition will have wide-spread implications for understanding how the brain encodes complex behaviors. Third, classroom-based research is expensive and difficult. By developing an analogue of reading in a motor task that can be run efficiently in the laboratory, this project may enable psychologists and educators to understand the fundamental learning principles that underlie reading in a much more cost-effective way, allowing for more targeted interventions in the classroom.
