S1-12. Neuroscience and early literacy: Dr. Bruce McCandliss

Susan and Dr. Bruce McCandliss, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, chat about combining neuroscience with education. How does neuroscience help us understand the changes going on in the brain of a child learning to read? Why do some children struggle so profoundly? He shares his research into focusing the student’s attention on letters and sounds versus on the word as a whole.

Quotes: 

“Teachers play a huge role in shaping brain development for reading.”

“This is where education and neuroscience are coming together to create a dialogue in the space of how we support children.”

Resources:

• Bringing Words to Life, Second Edition: Robust Vocabulary Instruction by Isabel Beck
• Where Is Educational Neuroscience? by John T. Bruer, PhD
• 2019 Education Trends by Carrie Gajowski, MA
• Minds, Brains, and Learning: Understanding the Psychological and Educational Relevance of Neuroscientific Research by James P. Byrnes
• Podcast discussion guide
• Want to discuss the episode? Join our Facebook group Science of Reading: The Community.

Episode timestamps*
02:00: Introduction: Who is Bruce McCandless?
02:00: Bruce's Journey into Early Literacy and Neuroscience
05:00: Cognitive Science vs. Neuroscience
07:00: Educational Neuroscience and Brain Development
22:00: The Role of Teachers in Shaping Brain Development
39:00: Future Directions in Educational Neuroscience
45:00: Conclusion and Takeaways
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute

Transcript

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Susan Lambert: What if a change in classroom practice could lead to a change in reading outcomes? What should reading instruction include to ensure all students have the opportunity to succeed? What does cognitive science tell us about learning to read, and why aren't those learnings applied in our classrooms? Welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast. I'm your host, Susan Lambert from Amplify Education. Join us every two weeks as we talk with Science of Reading experts to explore what it takes to transform our classrooms and develop confident and capable readers. In today's episode, we talk about the intersection between cognitive and neuroscience as it relates to developing readers. Bruce McCandless joins me—a professor at Stanford University in the Graduate School of Education. He helps us understand the importance of neuroscience and how it's helped both confirm and extend cognitive science findings. Don't let the word neuroscience scare you away. Bruce breaks things down in truly understandable ways, and after you listen, check out his impressive bio. Well, welcome Bruce. Thank you so much for being a guest on our podcast today.

Bruce McCandliss: Well, thanks. It's a pleasure to be here.

Susan Lambert: We always like to start by asking just a little bit about your background, and how is it that you ended up in this early literacy space, even though you're a neuroscientist as well.

Bruce McCandliss: Yeah, that's a great question. So, when I was training in human neuroscience, it was just around the time that brain scans became safe for children for imaging what's going on inside the mind and brain of a child. And for imaging them repeatedly, to see how things were sort of changing over time within a child's mind and brain. And this opened up some really amazing new opportunities to ask new questions that we haven't really asked before. And right around that same time, I was told about a young girl who arrived in an inner-city Pittsburgh school around age 12. And she was completely unable to read more than just a few words, like, the highest frequency words. And the school was struggling, what to do with her. They reached out to the university to help find her a tutor. And, I thought this was an amazing opportunity. And I studied the methods of a master reading teacher named Isabelle Beck, who's also a researcher, and she guided me through the process, over about six months, how to structure an entire systematic introduction to literacy for this young girl and to walk her through it at her own pace and to personalize it. And I applied these techniques … and some of the techniques were pretty fascinating. And I became really interested in: how was this working? And over the course of six months, I watched this girl go from being a complete novice who couldn't read a word to a girl who was really confident reading whole sentences and even paragraphs, confidently, on her own, and just watching this transformation happen right before my eyes. Really, I was just fascinated.I was wondering like, what is going on inside of her brain that is allowing her to do this? And how is it that our exchanges as a tutor and a student were actually having a cause-and-effect relationship on her building these new neural circuits and being able to do this? So I really put these two things together: our ability to use brain imaging to kind of ask these new questions. And this, I think, is just a remarkable example of human brain plasticity, where the human brain can develop new connections and enable us to do new things—these two possibilities just sort of came together right around the same time and became something I was just deeply fascinated by and wanted to study more and more.

Susan Lambert: Wow. What, what an amazing success story, both for her and for you.

Bruce McCandliss: Yeah. No, it was great. I think we both learned a lot in the process,

Susan Lambert: And it sounds like it's launched you into doing many, many more things. And you talked a little bit about this idea of cognitive science and neuroscience, so, as you were maybe working with this girl or as, you know, part of your work, how would you describe the connections? How are they similar? How are they different?

Bruce McCandliss: Hmm. Well, you know, I think of cognitive science as really the study of how the mind carries out its central functions. Like recalling our memories, or interpreting the feelings in somebody's expression, understanding the words we hear, and seeing all the objects in the world to guide our thoughts and actions. All of this cognitive science has been studied primarily by looking in a scientific way at human behavior very, very carefully, and very analytically. And we've been able to develop great theories about how function works, and these theories have come to really help explain how the human mind works. But at the same time, advances in neuroimaging—just brain scanning—have allowed us to take all of these functions and study them in a whole new way, by understanding how different networks in the brain contribute to specific functions. It opens up a whole bunch of new questions that work hand-in-glove with cognitive science. So we can ask, “How does this network—” if you can measure it, you can ask, “How does one network differ from one learner to another in ways that really matter? And how do networks change over the course of a really successful learning engagement or tutoring experience or something like this? And what is the typical path from novice to expert? And then, where are places that kids really get stuck along the way, and how can we help them?” By studying cognitive science together with the methods of neuroimaging, we developed this new kind of hybrid way of looking at things, which is much more powerful than just looking at behavior alone.

Susan Lambert: Sure. And I've heard you talk about your work. Your work is—right now, at least—even more specific. And it relates to an intersection between neuroscience and education. Can you tell us more about that?

Bruce McCandliss: Yeah. So moving beyond just cognitive neuroscience or even how children develop—how the mind develops within a child's head—there are these new questions coming up that are really about the interaction between a child's educational experience and their brain development. So there's a lot of big questions that get to the heart of educational neuroscience, specifically as it relates to the Science of Reading. So we can start to ask, “What are the most important changes going on in the brain of a child as they learn to read?” And this has been a fascinating area of research that really connects something beyond just basic brain function and into really the specific kind of products—or most important achievements—of education. Then we can also ask questions that I think are really interacting with what we do in early education, which is we try to understand: “What are the basic skills that a child brings to education that they're actually building upon?” That's the strengths that they have already, that they're actively engaging while they're learning. And, “What are these basic skills that are most important for a child when they come to the task and the challenge of learning to read?” We can start to use neuroimaging or educational neuroscience to ask these kinds of building-block questions, to really understand why, you know, a child might struggle with rhyming. There may be particular networks in their brain that make it really a different challenge for them when they learn to read than other children. And really, the hope is that by combining cognitive neuroscience and these educational questions—you know, brain imaging of these basic pre-reading skills—might help us understand why some children struggle so profoundly…and maybe even that understanding the process of rewiring the brain for reading can actually help us help struggling readers in a new way, and really check our understanding of how this works in a brand new way. But beyond all this, I think there's a new question emerging in the field of education, which is really this question about, “Can the way a teacher focuses a child's attention during learning impact how the neural networks in their brain are changing?” And this is really a question that is at the center of educational neuroscience: “Does the way we set up educational experiences and the resources we bring to bear and the challenges we provide for these kids and the supports we give them—can that actually have an impact on the process, the brain mechanisms that are changing, that support our ability to learn to read?”

Susan Lambert: Hmm. That's super-fascinating. I think many of our listeners probably aren't as familiar with the impact that neuroscience is having in terms of classroom instruction and what that might mean. We've spent a lot of time on this podcast so far talking about what it takes for kids to actually become proficient readers. And I'm really curious about what your point of view is on that as it relates to the work that you're doing.

Bruce McCandliss: Yeah. Well, I think that for me, again, The Science of Reading—which is a cognitive science of really understanding how things are changing over time and how the expert brain really does its job—is working hand-in-glove with brain imaging around two really big ideas that I think are really important for educators to understand. So, if you think about reading, you can divide it into two pretty separate systems or two big challenges that kids and brains have to overcome. So first, think about a system whose job it is to turn collections of letters into the exact word that was intended. This might be one out of what might be tens of thousands of candidate words that you're looking at at this moment, and your brain figures out what the exact word is that relates to those letters! And this has been a really difficult problem for cognitive science to work out: How on earth does a human brain do this, in the expert? And even a bigger question: how it is that kids really crack this code and learn how to decode letters and turn them into the sounds of language. And it turns out that this whole system is one of the most dramatic changes which is occurring in a kid during the first couple years of learning to read. We can image those changes; we can understand systems and that word-recognition system; and crucially, it's not just a one-and-done, like the brain learns to decode letters. But the quality of this system—the precision and the fluency of this system—has a huge impact on another system. Which is another whole set of brain networks that are really key at comprehending the sentences that these words are forming. So, two systems working together. One, you almost have to build a word-recognition circuit in your brain that works really, really well at turning letters directly into the exact words, and it has its own automatic process when education goes really well. And then a second system is putting those words together into understanding what the sentence is and what the nuances of that word mean, and continuing to build vocabulary and semantic networks and all of these things that we think about as being foundational to education.

Susan Lambert: So it sounds like there is rewiring happening all over within our brains for both pieces of these processes.

Bruce McCandliss: Yes. I think that's exactly the way to think about it. There's this rewiring process, where neural circuits in the brain that were really meant to build these basic sub-skills, like recognizing all the things that we see in the world and knowing exactly what they are, or hearing all the sounds that human mouths are making and knowing exactly what word they're saying, these two different systems can rewire in a way—remarkable human brain plasticity going on in the first couple years of learning, where kids really learn to take two precursor systems and wire them together into this integrated circuit that can automatically recognize visual words.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. That's fascinating. And I know I've heard you and others say, too, that we know that learning to read is not a natural process. And it's something our brains have not yet evolved to do. Can you set the stage for that or talk a little bit more about that?

Bruce McCandliss: Yes. So, in most cultures, we believe, that don't necessarily integrate early alphabetic literacy into all of their societal interactions, some of the most important things for the human brain to do are to rapidly process visual information and then completely separate systems have to rapidly identify the spoken words. And these two systems are, in a sense, natural systems, as part of the human evolutionary niche to be able to do these things profoundly. And we find that it's universal, across the world, that children grow up to be able to do these things with really, really amazing speed and accuracy. But these two systems were not designed to work together. So the invention of literacy is asking kids to take two subsystems that they have some mastery over, and combine them together in a brand new way, so that the system that analyzes all the visual features of objects is now talking directly to the system that analyzes all of the little parts within spoken words to figure out which words people are saying. And these two systems are physically wired together. There are new functional connections between these systems that are unfolding over the first couple of years of literacy, and they're continuing to strengthen all the way across the literacy journey to expert reader.

Susan Lambert: Wow. And you can actually watch that happen with brain imaging.

Bruce McCandliss: Yes. That's where the field is right now. There are multiple studies happening in different places all over the world that are kind of taking snapshots of children, you know, every two weeks or every two months, and watching, sort of in stop-motion photography, the evolution of this brain-reading circuitry. It's remarkable to see and to study, as one of the big questions in science: How is it that our learning experiences are reprogramming the circuitry of the brain?

Susan Lambert: And you've been able to look at the brains or the inner workings of those very proficient readers, compared to the brains or the inner workings of those that are not as proficient, and make some comparisons?

Bruce McCandliss: Yes. That's been a remarkable aspect of the field: Moving beyond the question of “How does the human brain learn to read?” Which has been kind of a big mystery. And we've gotten some great insights into that. But moving beyond the human brain, it turns out that there are pretty big and pretty important individual differences in all of the human brains. So, in any one classroom, there's a whole diversity of strengths that kids have in sort of processing the little sounds within spoken language and processing all of the visual features within objects and how these subsystems work. There's incredible variety—what you could call neurodiversity—within a classroom. And studying how differences that matter between kids before they learn to read wind up impacting the reading acquisition process has been a very exciting growth area for science. And we're starting to learn—or actually, I see it more of as a convergence of knowledge—that the Science of Reading, which has been decades ahead of this neuroimaging studies, has found a whole lot of really profound insights into how learning to read and how this word-recognition system is functioning in different kids and what sorts of supports they need when reading is struggling or they're failing to learn to read.

Susan Lambert: Hmm. That's really interesting, given all the attention right now that we have to those students that are dyslexic or exhibiting signs of dyslexia, to be able to actually get inside the head to figure out what it is that we need to do for intervention.

Bruce McCandliss: Yeah, no, it's been a remarkable growth area. And I see it kind of fortifying what we've been learning in the Science of Reading, and even extending it in novel ways, to really try to understand: What are the dynamics of the brain systems that are most crucial for learning to read? In some of our studies that we've done with New York City public school children, we found that the way a kid's brain activates during reading can be largely predicted by a simple test that asks how facile they are at things like rhyming or pig Latin or these phonological awareness games. And we've had studies in which we look at how active is the brain when a child just looks at a very simple word and makes a very simple decision about it. You can look at the brain activity during that entire process and you can actually predict brain activity: how active this circuit is for an individual child, based on how well they do on this precursor skill of phonological awareness. Suggesting that there's a profound relationship between how individual kids come into the reading journey, if you will; how skilled they are already at processing the sounds within words and manipulating those sounds and accessing those sounds within words has a profound impact on how active their brain circuit will be when they're actually reading visual words.

Susan Lambert: So I'm gonna say that back to you another way: So basically, what we know is that, for early readers, this phonological phonemic awareness work and instruction is really important as a foundational element. And what you're saying is that's what's actually mapping, then, to this other part of the brain when we start to recognize sounds and letter combinations or words?

Bruce McCandliss: Yes, that's a crucial part of the expert reading circuit is this connection between the visual forms of letters and words and the spoken forms of the sounds of language. So we're learning a lot about how these two things connect and how critically important those precursor skills are for building the circuit. And this is not, in a sense, this is not really news. This is not really some novel discovery in a way. But it's really a convergence of science, of the science that has been studying the behaviors of children for decades. And now this more precise, exact way of looking at the circuits and how they're working inside of a child's brain, they're really converging to support this notion that expert word recognition is fundamentally related to taking all the codes that the brain uses to understand objects, taking all the codes that the brain uses to understand spoken words, and linking them together in this novel way.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. So you would say, then, it's an affirmation of the cognitive science?

Bruce McCandliss: Well, an affirmation and also an extension. Because now we can take that very same brain circuit and we can study it before a child learns to read. We can study the precursors of a child. We can see, you know, if a child has profound visual difficulties or a child has even subtle challenges with thinking about the sounds of language, we can look at the circuits that are related to that and watch how they change as the child learns to read. And so this, I think, is taking this basic set of insights that we have from cognitive science and giving them new tools to explore: How is this thing changing with experiences? How is this rewiring being influenced by really specific interventions that might focus a child's attention on these skills and help scaffold them in making incremental gains in these skills and strengthening those skills really specifically? This is, I think, where education and brain imaging or the neuroscience or the cognitive neuroscience are really coming together to create a dialogue in this space, of how should we be supporting these children? What kind of things might be useful? And what kind of things are specifically useful to the particular challenges they're having?

Susan Lambert: Yeah. I'd like to segue to talk a little bit about a study that you did with different instructional approaches to helping kids learn to read a word, based on this idea of a whole word or a letter sound. Can you explain that study to us?

Bruce McCandliss: Yeah. This was one of my favorite studies that we did, because I think it really captures this question about the education part of educational neuroscience. And we started with this basic question: Could the way a learner winds up changing their brain networks, over time, be directly influenced by how the teacher introduces and supports the action? So, for example, if we took learners and we taught them a brand-new writing system that they'd never seen before, and we made sure that they had exactly the same materials and the same exact sort of time to study, and they were the same exact learners randomized to these different conditions, and we only wanted to vary just one thing, and that was: did the instructions they got from the teacher at the beginning focus their mind on the sounds of language? Focus on this specific sub-skill of linking every single letter within a word to every nuance in its spoken form? And we had instructions and supports and activities that specifically focused on that. Versus if the same learners, taking the very same materials, if they had a teacher that was focusing their minds on recognizing all of the words—“try to figure out what the word is; you might get a hint or you might get the name of a word, and just try to link the name of the word directly to that word without ever thinking about the parts inside”—and we contrasted how learning played out over the course of several learning sessions, and we measured incremental improvements, using these scientific methods for looking at increments of learning over time, and we were able to essentially discover that there were pretty big differences in the way this subtle form of support has on the way the learners were progressing over time. So, when the learners were focused on letters and sounds and working out this relationship, learning was a little bit slower, but they had a tremendous ability to decode words that they'd never seen before in this new writing system. When the same kind of learners were focused on learning these words, just as a whole-language sort of approach—“just look at the word and say it; I'll say it to you; just kind of memorize that relationship; never focus on the parts inside”—learning was pretty rapid, but it was actually pretty fragile as well. So if they learned one set of words, they come back and learn the next set of words, and actually, learning is degraded a little bit. There's interference between one set of words and another inner set of words. Which makes sense! The words all kind of look the same, and they all kind of sound the same. And as you learn more and more of these, they start to interfere with each other. And we are really prone to getting mixed up and making mistakes. But the most interesting part of this is that we combined this with a brain-scanning technique called event-related potentials, and we were able to examine how their brains were changing over time as they were engaged in this learning. And remarkably, it turns out that the learners that were focused on the parts within the words, how the letters relate to the sounds and how to decode things when they saw these words—we looked at the brain activity just about 200 milliseconds after they saw the word—their brain showed this remarkable left lateralized pattern. We could see this activity that was related to their learning that looked a lot like what expert readers do. There's this engagement of these left-hemisphere mechanisms that are really important for decoding words. But when the other group—we looked at the very same words that they studied for the same amount of time, but they had focused on the entire word and just this paired-association method—when they looked at these words, they showed a very different brain network engaged. It was more of a right hemisphere activity. And we really didn't see them emulating what we see in the expert reader. So this drove home this really fascinating hypothesis that part of what's going on in early reading may be that teachers are helping to focus children's attention on working out all of these parts between letters and the way they're pronounced, and working out this systematic and fluent and automatic set of associations that allow them to decode any word. Those teachers are helping kids build this left-hemisphere expert reading circuit. And when children are completely un-scaffolded and just asked to memorize a whole bunch of words, they're not activating this circuit very well at all. And instead they're activating a right-hemisphere circuit that might be much less efficient for reading. So in a sense, teachers play a huge role in shaping brain development for reading.

Susan Lambert: Wow. And a couple of things just jumped out at me. Number one, when they're focusing on the sounds of the individual letters, you said it took a little more time, but it turned out to be pretty deep learning and deep connection, mirroring what expert readers do.

Bruce McCandliss: Yeah. Yeah. And another way of looking at this is that there's been this old idea in reading pedagogy for quite some time that if you just expose children to entire words and help them see what that entire word is by memorization or supports or guessing, the brain will just figure out how the little parts work inside there, and work out all those mappings between the letters and how they map onto the spoken part of pronunciations. And the brain will just figure all that out, almost subconsciously. And it turns out that even in really skilled readers with neurotypical brains, that this doesn't really happen. There are circumstances under which you have to actively attend. You have to drive selective attention to these little parts for the brain to create that activation and to get that rewiring process happening.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. So, I've often heard the idea that your brain is like a muscle. You just use it and it gets stronger and stronger and stronger. This, to me, feels like … you know, there's a difference between using a muscle and actually doing the work of rewiring.

Bruce McCandliss: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Susan Lambert: And the importance that a teacher would play in what you've called this selective attention to information. Can you expand a little bit on that concept?

Bruce McCandliss: Yeah. Well, just going on the muscle analogy for a second, you might think that the brain is like a muscle, so you activate your muscles and the muscles grow. It turns out when people are actually training for elite sports, they don't just go and activate all of their muscles, getting lots of experience running around in all kinds of random ways. But they actually very selectively attend to particular muscles that they wanna train, that they wanna make very efficient and stronger. And by targeting those muscles in isolation, they can lead to really rapid growth of these muscles. And then they can learn to integrate those muscles in various ways. And I think there's a deep parallel to that and learning. So. When you're in a classroom, or when you're in a reading lesson, there are dozens and dozens of things that might capture your attention that you might focus on or you might sort of find interesting and focus your mind on briefly, and your mind might dart around between all of these things. But a really skilled teacher can guide a student's mind to selectively attend to the patterns of letters within visual words and focus their attention on each individual letter, and learn specifically how that relates to the pronunciation of the word. And when children focus their minds in this way, just the act of focusing has a remarkable phenomenon that we call top-down attention activation. When you focus your mind on a very specific thing, the brain circuit related to that function actually increases its activity. We've done experiments in which we've asked fully literate adults to lie inside a scanner and to listen to words and music. And we were studying if they selectively attend to the words and selectively attend to the sound within the words to make rhyming judgments, and that's their goal: They're using their intention to focus their mind on the rhymes within words. We see this activation of this entire reading-expert network that includes analyzing the sounds within language, all the way down to the brain areas that recognize visual words. But when they listen to the same exact thing, and they focus their attention on something else, like the music, this entire network becomes suppressed. So, in a sense, the thing that we're attending to directly impacts our brain activity. So teachers can guide attention to particular information and increase activity in very specific networks for children that can play a role in how these things are rewiring and how they're changing. So selective attention, in a sense, becomes this construct that we can use inside neuroscience in this highly specific way—looking at how selective attention increased brain activity in a very particular circuit like reading—but we can also use selective attention as a bridge to education. And teachers can really learn how to guide a student's selective attention to the most important information that they should be focusing on. There's a number of pedagogical techniques that can really help a child focus specifically on just their zone of proximal development of how they're decoding words or how efficiently their brain is, you know, being able to map all of the letters within a word to its pronunciation and build up larger and larger vocabulary. And it's really—I think—a new way of thinking about the art of teaching, is that you're actually playing a role in this brain development process by guiding selective attention to the most important information at just the right time.

Susan Lambert: That's fascinating. And you know, what that makes me think of is the example that you used at the beginning of our conversation, about Isabel Beck helping you understand what that child needed in order to become a proficient reader. Sort of the same idea.

Bruce McCandliss: Yeah, I think so. Isabel Beck … when we looked at her techniques, from the lens of cognitive neuroscience and cognitive science, this really clear picture emerged that there's a lot of techniques that you can use to drive a child's selective attention to every single letter within a visual word form. Which is challenging for a lot of kids. They often just look at the first letter and kind of guess. 

Susan Lambert: Right. 

Bruce McCandliss: Their brain never really uses this attention spotlight to focus exactly on which letter happens in exactly which order, and how that should impact their pronunciation. And Isabel had these amazing techniques where she would put words—instead of just having them be like a visual object, she would put every single letter on an individual tile. And then she would just take away one tile at a time and ask the kid, “Well, what would happen to the word if I did this?” And grab one little tile and put another tile in there. “What would happen to the word pronunciation if I did this?” And what that did is it allowed the children to take this skill that they had—this amazing skill really, of nearly a hundred percent accuracy—of looking at the first letter and getting that pronunciation into their guess. And she helped them take that strength and apply it to every single position within the visual word form. By guiding their selective attention there, and then providing supports about how this impacts the pronunciation, and keep adjusting the challenge so that it becomes more and more challenging and the kid extends their skill to the next level of complexity and the next level of complexity until suddenly they can really competently decode all 3,000 monosyllabic words that can be possibly written in the English language.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. So knowing that sound-letter mapping allowed them to generalize that, in ways that whole-word instruction doesn't let you do that.

Bruce McCandliss: Yeah. And it wasn't just an isolated letter-sound mapping. I think this is sometimes lost when people think about a cartoon version of things like a systematic phonics curriculum. But really, the techniques that are most effective are using real words, and are helping kids to focus when they look at a word, to represent the entire word, and at the same time, appreciate what the phonetic elements are for every position within the word. So the child, in a sense, builds this fortified word-recognition system, which can look at every single grain size simultaneously. So you can look at a word and you can say, “Oh, I know exactly what that word is. I've seen it a thousand times.” Or you can look at a word and you can say, “Oh, I recognize that rhyme unit. Those last four letters at the end of the word, they might make a sound like “eed” or “ode” or “ooh.” And they can learn to recognize those rhyme units, as well as recognizing sort of every single consonant and every single vowel and the impact that they have. So when they look at a visual word, they're firing on all cylinders. They can recognize the word at the word level; they can recognize the rhyme at the rhyme level. They can recognize the onset. They can recognize each individual phoneme. And by combining all these skills at once, they have a very rapid and robust word-recognition experience. And when you have a rapid and robust word-recognition experience, guess what happens? Reading comprehension becomes easier. You can actually focus your mind on the message that's being taught. And this is one of the big insights of Chuck Perfetti’s work: that the quality of your word recognition, well into third grade and fourth grade, is one of the biggest determiners of how well you can comprehend an entire passage.

Susan Lambert: Hmm. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And what's so interesting about this work that you're doing is, I think, as proficient readers and even as teachers, we forget the hard work that it takes early in the reading process to really develop that strong foundation, to be able to put the decoding aside, to be able to focus on the comprehension.

Bruce McCandliss: Yeah. It's easy to just look at that and kind of wonder and shrug, “What's the big problem?” But when you really look at the computations that the human brain is doing during word recognition, you marvel, “How do people ever even do this?” Like, here's the problem from the brain's perspective: I know, let's say, 40,000 words, and here's one of them, in a collection of five letters. Which of these 50,000 words is that? 

Susan Lambert: <laughing> Yeah. 

Bruce McCandliss: How do I … and you have to figure that out in the blink of an eye! Like, in less than 220 milliseconds! You have to know exactly what word that is. And how the brain solves this problem is really remarkable. And I think that this discovery of phonetic coding that the Phoenicians had was a really huge jump forward that enabled a lot of literacy to really take off.

Susan Lambert: And they probably never knew that you were going to be able to look inside of the brain and see what happens to that as people are sounding out words.

Bruce McCandliss: Yeah.

Susan Lambert: So what's next and what's new in your work, as it relates to cognitive neuroscience and literacy?

Bruce McCandliss: Well, there's a couple of things going on that I think are really quite exciting. So, most of what happens— in terms of trying to connect education and neuroscience—seems to happen in a way that goes over this really big separation between dynamic things that are happening within a school system, as a child progresses through school, and a university lab, which is often in the basement of some building that uses a brain scanner that might weigh over two tons and a child gets inside of a little tube and we've changed the magnetic gradients so fast that they make these really loud pinging noises. And trying to relate these two things, there's sort of a huge gap between them: The isolated brain imaging lab at the university and all of the dynamic contextual learning that's happening inside schools. 

Susan Lambert: Sure.

Bruce McCandliss: And I think that that's beginning to change. There's an initiative at Stanford to try to bring brain imaging directly into school and actually making it a part of the school. Make it a tool that the school uses to teach children about their own brains and how they work and how they're developing and focusing their attention and changing their mental states, and meditative states can actually change their brain’s function in the moment, and the way they can see it, is now a real possibility. So, we have a really unique partnership happening with a local school, in which we've set up a brain imaging center right inside the school. It's focused mostly on studying brainwaves. And we are able to use brainwaves to look at this expert reading circuit as it is developing in school. And we have studies going on right now in which we're asking the question, “How are these students' brains changing over the course of a school year? And how might it relate to what the teachers are observing and what they're reporting on a whole number of factors that are going on with that child?” And we're also exploring other things, to say like, “How are children towards the end of this K–8 experience? How are their brains automatically recognizing words when they're trying to comprehend messages?”

Susan Lambert: Wow, that's really exciting, to have these two things coming together all in one place. I would imagine that's going to be leaps forward in terms of understanding how we can help students learn how to read.

Bruce McCandliss: Yeah. Another big exciting development in terms of looking at reading is there's been a great growth of studies looking at this second system of language— oral language comprehension—and reading comprehension as it works out in the brain networks. And there are fascinating things that are happening. To look at, you know, what are the circuits in the brain that we use when we're trying to infer the mental state of a character in a story that we're listening to or reading. And it turns out that these circuits—these comprehension circuits that are doing all of this complex social cognition—are really quite distinct from these circuits that are just doing the automatic word recognition for us. And we can start to see how these two systems work together to support what we think of as this unified ability of reading.

Susan Lambert: Wow, that's really interesting. So now we're actually talking about both elements of the Simple View of Reading—both language comprehension and word recognition—and how they intersect and interplay with each other.

Bruce McCandliss: Yeah. And one of the hopes is that we can take this challenge of reading comprehension and we could start to understand all of its basic building blocks and all of the big bottlenecks and transformations that kids go through when they become expert reading comprehenders.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. Which is the ultimate goal, right?

 Bruce McCandliss: Yeah. I've been working with a whole network of researchers that are trying to understand, “What are all the basic components or micro skills that a really skilled third grader might use when they're comprehending a text?” And it turns out that they're doing a remarkable number of things that the pre-reader has no clue about. And we're studying, “How is it that we could help kids accelerate their development or support their development in all of those little micro skills?” 

Susan Lambert: Hmm. Interesting. So if some of our listeners were curious about following some of that work, what's the best way for us to follow that work?

Bruce McCandliss: Oh, that's a great question. What's the best way to follow this work? I think that there is emerging literature that really sits right at the boundary between education and neuroscience. So there are a number of journals now that really focus on meaningful neuroscience breakthroughs and discoveries, and building theories that actually have a potential impact or a dialogue to be played with education.So there are a number of journals out there, like Educational Neuroscience and Trends in Educational Science and, Mind, Brain, and Education, just to name a few, that are specifically focused on this intersection between cognitive science and education. And the dialogue just gets richer and richer every year.

Susan Lambert: Thanks for that. And we'll try to find those and link our listeners to them in some of the show notes. This has just been so great, to have you on today, to help us understand more about how the brain is working and what we need to do in terms of instruction to help all students be successful. And I'm hoping that as we wrap up here, you could maybe end by giving our listeners one or maybe two takeaways that you'd want them to remember or think more about as it relates to learning how to read.

Bruce McCandliss: Wow. One thing I'd love teachers to take away is a new understanding of what teachers are actually doing. The way teachers shape their lessons and their supportive challenges for children may actually be helping to shape and challenge and strengthen very particular brain circuits, which are gonna be crucial foundations for a kid's future learning. So teachers, in a sense, are earning engineers that are helping the child, cooperating with the child, to engineer new abilities within that child's brain that they're gonna take with them for a lifetime.

Susan Lambert: You know, that's amazing. I was a classroom teacher and I think I didn't always get the respect that I felt I should have, shaping new minds. So maybe we can just change the title of Teacher to Learning Engineer. Maybe that would be helpful.

Bruce McCandliss: Maybe that would be helpful.

Bruce McCandliss: But I do think that regardless of respect from outside, you probably did get something that a lot of people don't get to experience, and that is witnessing firsthand the transformation that's happening in another human being right in front of you. I think this is the thing that teachers thrive on seeing and is a dividend that they get that really no other profession provides in quite the same way.

Susan Lambert: That is absolutely true. And I know teachers that I talk with, across the country and classrooms that I'm in, that's the thing that drove them to education: that transformation that happens within the school year with their students. Well, thank you very much for joining us. Like I said, we'll link our listeners in the show notes to some of the resources you recommend and keep us up to date on what's happening.

Bruce McCandliss: Oh, I'd love to. Thanks for a great conversation. Okay. Take care.

Susan Lambert: We're so grateful to our amazing guest today and to all of you, making a difference in the lives of students every single day. Be sure to check the show notes for resource links from today's podcast. And we want to hear your stories and successes. Follow us on Facebook at Science of Reading: The Community. Or if you're looking to help implement the Science of Reading, send an email to SORmatters@amplify.com. Tell us what guests you think we should book or tell us about the research that really excites you. And be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app, so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, I'm Susan Lambert.