Episode description

Kathy Rastle, a leading expert on skilled reading and learning to read, visits Google to discuss how her lab’s research has had a major influence on how children around the world are taught to read. Learning to read is the most important milestone of a child’s education. Yet, reading is not a universal part of the human experience. Writing is a recent cultural invention and reading is a learned skill whose mastery requires years of instruction, dedication, and practice. Kathy will walk us through what psychological science has discovered about this fascinating process, and share her reflections on how we can use this knowledge to improve literacy for children around the world.

Kathy’s research is focused on reading acquisition, skilled reading, and the relationship between reading and spoken language. She has a particular interest in characterizing the information that is present in written languages, and in understanding how this information is learned through instruction and text experience. Recently, she conducted a number of artificial language learning experiments investigating how acquired knowledge is influenced by properties of languages and writing systems, the quality of prior knowledge, and the nature of instruction.

Visit YouTube.com/TalksatGoogle to watch the video.