Feb. 23: Mark Seidenberg

The Science of Reading and Its Educational Implications
Research in cognitive science, developmental science, and neuroscience has made enormous progress toward understanding skilled reading, the acquisition of reading skill, the brain bases of reading, the causes of developmental reading impairments and how such impairments can be treated. My question is: if the science is so good, why do so many people read so poorly? I will mainly focus on the United States, where the reading levels of about 25-30% of the population are low by standard metrics, with an eye on comparisons to other countries. I will consider three possible contributing factors: the fact that English has a deep alphabetic orthography; how reading is taught; and the impact of linguistic variability as manifested in the US by the Black-White “achievement gap”. I conclude that there are opportunities to increase literacy levels by making better use of what we have learned about reading and language, but also institutional obstacles and understudied issues for which more evidence is badly needed.

BIO:
Mark S. Seidenberg is Hilldale and Donald O. Hebb Professor in the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has conducted research on many topics related to reading and language since the disco era. His reading research addresses the nature of skilled reading, how children learn to read, dyslexia, and the brain bases of reading, using the tools of modern cognitive neuroscience: behavioral experiments, computational models, and neuroimaging. His current research focuses on the causes of chronically low reading performance among poor and minority children, particularly the effects of language background on learning to read. He is among the most highly cited researchers in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. His book Reading Matters will be published by Basic Books (late 2015).

This talk will be held in 3105 Tolman, 12:00-1:30pm.