Science of Reading: The Podcast

S9 E7: Neurodiversity and the reading brain, with Ioulia Kovelman, Ph.D.

• Amplify Education • Season 9 • Episode 7

Share episode

Susan is joined by Ioulia Kovelman, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan, to give educators the perspective of a developmental cognitive neuroscientist on literacy development. Starting with the basics of cognitive science versus brain science, Ioulia gives a comprehensive overview into how the brain changes as children learn to read, including differences seen in neurodiverse students and multilingual/English learners. Ioulia then answers a question from our listener mailbag on neuroscience and dyslexia and how current research can inform teaching strategies. Ioulia ends with a rallying message that scientists, teachers, and children cannot stand alone and need to find ways to connect with each other to strengthen literacy as a whole.

Show notes:


Quotes:
“We are different learners. And these are really different learners. And by giving them literacy instruction, targeted literacy instruction, we are changing their brains. But that doesn't mean we're making them the same.” —Ioulia Kovelman, Ph.D.

“We talked about languages being different. They're exercising slightly different muscles of your language system.” —Ioulia Kovelman, Ph.D.

“Science is informed by teachers and children. We're all together. I do not teach children. Teachers don't usually do science. But we have to find ways of connecting with each other.” —Ioulia Kovelman, Ph.D. 

Episode timestamps*
02:00 Introduction: Who is Ioulia?
06:00 Cognitive science vs brain science
08:00 How the brain changes as children learn to read
11:00 Following brain development for children that struggle with language development
14:00 Physical differences in brain development between the average brain and a neurodiverse brain
17:00 Mailbag question: Neuroscience and dyslexia
20:00 How neuroscience informs teaching strategies for children with dyslexia
25:00 Monolingual vs multilingual brains
33:00 Language literacy lab
38:00 Connecting research to classroom instruction
41:00 Final thoughts
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute


Ioulia Kovelman:

The use of neuroimaging allows us to, for instance, compare children who might actually have the same reading abilities, but may have very different strategies for reading.

Susan Lambert:

This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify . How might recent advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology reshape our understanding of dyslexia and other reading disabilities? That fantastic question, from our listener mailbag, will be answered on today's episode, with developmental cognitive neuroscientist Ioulia Kovelman. Dr. Kovelman is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, and the director of the Language & Literacy Lab. And she's joining us during this season-long reading reboot to explore how developmental cognitive neuroscience can support the work of teachers and educators in literacy development. Let's get to the conversation. Well, Dr . Ioulia Kovelman, it's so great to have you on today's episode. I think you said it's OK if I call you Ioulia, is that right?

Ioulia Kovelman:

Yes, of course. Please do.

Susan Lambert:

Well, we would love if you could introduce yourself to our listeners, and just say a little bit about your background, and what you do.

Ioulia Kovelman:

Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Ioulia Kovelman. I am a faculty at the University of Michigan. I study how children learn to read, especially children who are multilingual and speak more than one language. As you can hear in my accent, I am also an immigrant in the United States. Russian is my native language. I have traversed multiple countries and spaces and languages, and have lived in immigrant and refugee spaces. So I understand the challenges that children face when they are in a new space, in a new school, and faced with a new language. And among them are children with learning differences. We wanna do the best for our kids. This is what I do. This is what our lab studies.

Susan Lambert:

That's awesome. And we'll talk a little bit more about your lab later, but I think you are officially a developmental cognitive neuroscience scientist. Is that right?

Ioulia Kovelman:

That is correct. I'm a developmental cognitive neuroscientist.

Susan Lambert:

What exactly do they do, or do you do? And maybe even, particularly, why should educators care about what you do?

Ioulia Kovelman:

Of course. So we are scientists. We're researchers who study the intersection between children's cognitive development and children's brain development. We think they have something to do with each other. And about 20 years ago, you could study children's cognitive development, but you couldn't really study children's brain development, because our brain imaging methods were not child friendly. So the only way we would do it is on animal models. But , mice don't go to school <laugh>, and neither do cats. So, as brain imaging methods have improved and became more child friendly, we now have this new and exciting discipline. Again, it's now been probably around 20 years, but we're still excited about it, that we can now study children's brain development and cognitive development together. The reason we think educators should care about this is because, first of all, this is science. And science is important. All kinds of sciences are important. We have been teaching children since the beginning of humanity. We have also been trying to treat and remedy each other since the beginning of humanity. At the same time, we no longer use like bloodletting and leeches to treat disease. And neither do we ask children to memorize verbatim chunks of Homer as part of our education system. We have made great progress, and part of that is scientific development. Research is important in informing how we approach anything, from treating cancer to helping children learn how to read. Both are equally as important. The use of neuroimaging allows us to, for instance, compare children who might actually have the same reading abilities, but may have very different strategies for reading. And so it's hard to capture when you're just looking at how children read. When you look at how the brain works, you gain an additional insight into how this child reads a word compared to another child. And that gives us insights into both typical and atypical reading, as well as reading strategies that might be more individualized and better tailored to an individual learner.

Susan Lambert:

So can I ask a super basic question? And I'm hoping you can help us with this. You talk about the differences between cognitive science and neuroscience. And I think I have this right, but help me if I'm wrong. Cognitive scientists really study the mind, and neuroscientists study the brain. If you were trying to explain the differences between the mind and the brain, or cognitive science and neuroscience, how would you do that? How would you explain those differences?

Ioulia Kovelman:

I am a developmental cognitive neuroscientist. So, I study mind and brain together. If you just study the brain, then you would be interested in, for instance, how parts of the brain that support memory develop. So hippocampus, right? So, I would be using mouse models. I might teach the mice something. I may then euthanize the mice, and look at their brains, and see how that brain changed. Or slice the brain into pieces, and put it in a Petri dish, and look at it. There are neuroscientists who study Alzheimer's disease, right? You cannot diagnose Alzheimer's until somebody is dead. And then you take their brain, and you slice it into pieces, you put it into Petri dishes, and you analyze the tissue. That's pure neuroscience. When the brain has been disconnected from the person, and it's in a Petri dish, that's pure neuroscience.

Susan Lambert:

Yikes, <laugh> .

Ioulia Kovelman:

And cognitive neuroscientists like to look at living children, and how they're thinking, and how their brain works when they're thinking. We don't just look at the brain in a Petri dish, if you will. We look at it together with the person.

Susan Lambert:

That's exciting, helpful, and makes me feel a little bit better about the work that you do. Super interesting. And thanks for taking that little side step . Related to reading development then, how does the brain change when children are learning how to read?

Ioulia Kovelman:

There are two major changes. One is that parts of the brain that support speaking connect, or connect in different ways, to the parts of the brain that support visual object recognition. All of us recognize a stop sign, right? You don't have to know the word stop. It kind of looks universal, right? You recognize the sign, you know what it means, and all of a sudden you actually take these symbols, and they're not connected to entire concepts, but actually individual sounds, right? Cat is made of C-A-T, and you've learned these letters, and now you need to connect them to the sounds. And then you actually memorize the entire form cat. And cat doesn't look like dog. Because for proficient readers, when we see a word, we do it really quickly. We don't analyze it, right? Because this is immediate recognitio. So the brain changes, it really changes. Because when you begin to read, you really have to analyze everything in front of you. The letter, the shape of the letter, how it connects to the sound. And proficient readers just look at the whole thing, and they grab it, and it's like they heard it. It's almost no difference. I speak, I read, it's a continuous stream of language. And I just grab it. And so that's a big neurological change. You have connected the parts of the brain that recognize visual information, visual symbols, to the parts of the brain that process language as you hear it. And the second big change is the fine-tuning of the language system.

Susan Lambert:

Oh , tell me more.

Ioulia Kovelman:

No adult goes around saying cat dog, and yet that is exactly what you need to do in order to read. So you all of a sudden become an expert in your own language. You fine-tune your language, your own language systems. All of us become linguists, right? Even though we don't have a PhD in linguistics, but all of us who learn how to read gain a lot of insights into what words are made of and what sentences are made of. And the better we do it, the better readers we are. So we are fine-tuning our own language system. The brain changes. If your mind changes, your brain changes as well. So there's two big things that are happening. One of them is that you've connected speech to vision. And second, you have fine-tuned your language, and you've connected it to attention and memory. That entire circuit of capabilities becomes specialized. You become a specialist, right? You start as a beginning shoemaker, and you come out as an expert shoemaker. But here, you begin speaking, and then you come out as an expert user of language.

Susan Lambert:

For kids that really struggle to develop, can you actually follow that, the way the brain works and looks differently? In terms of what you're looking at? In terms of the brain imaging?

Ioulia Kovelman:

Correct, correct. This is when we started the discussion on why we use neuroimaging. What additional information does it give you? That's exactly where we're at. In our lab, and many other labs we look at, we bring two groups of children. One group of children is seven, they're happy-go-lucky. They are learning to read, and they are what we call at grade level. And then we'll bring a group of nine-year-old children. They have a history of dyslexia, but they read like the seven-year-olds. If I had a blindfold on, and didn't see the child's age, and I just ask them to read the words, the seven-year-old and the nine-year-old will be identical. Now, we're gonna use brain imaging, and we're gonna look at what are the differences between the seven-year-old who is happy-go-lucky, they love school, they love to read, and a nine-year-old who is a struggling reader. And then I might have two nine-year-olds. I might have a nine-year-old who was just diagnosed, and is gonna go into therapy. I might have a nine-year-old who maybe their older brother had dyslexia, and the parents were already aware, so they got them tested early. And this nine-year-old has already had therapy. What's the difference? So, I can get kids who read identically, they're gonna read the same number of words, they recognize the same kinds of words, and yet we're expecting differences in how they process them . The concept of neurodiversity is profound. We are different learners. And these are really different learners. And by giving them literacy instruction, targeted literacy instruction, we are changing their brains. But that doesn't mean we are making them the same as the happy-go-lucky seven-year-old who is not having any difficulties and enjoys learning how to read. We as teachers would say we are helping them develop compensatory or alternative strategies. These are the strategies that an average reader may not require. But we are helping their mind to develop these strategies. And we're helping their brain rewire to be a reader. Children with dyslexia can be readers. Here, on the University of Michigan campus, we have students with dyslexia. And they have done so well that they are students here at the University of Michigan. And on many campuses around the world, we have students who have struggled. And I've talked to these students, but they're reading. They're reading just like their classmates. They're getting through the textbooks. They're doing so different. We know this, and that's what brain imaging gives us.

Susan Lambert:

Is there an easy way to share an example of what it might physically look like different? I know this is a podcast and we're talking, so we can't show any images, but if you're looking at the brain that is, let's say, typically developing.

Ioulia Kovelman:

Average. What an average group does and variation, right?

Susan Lambert:

Thank you for that. We'll talk about that. And if we were looking at an average development of a brain, how does it physically look different from kids that maybe have more neurodiversity?

Ioulia Kovelman:

So there's really nice work by my colleagues in Boston and < inaudible>, who looked at the children before and after they had begun to read, and looked at a group of children who seemed at risk. They were kindergartners, or pre-readers. They tested them and then there were follow-ups. When you know these children in grade two are not doing well in terms of learning, they're able to go back and look at how brains looked before they even started learning to read. And some of these kids seem to be doing better than others in that group. What they're seeing is that the kids with reading difficulties but who seem to be doing better than other children with reading difficulties, have better support systems in their right hemisphere. We have two hemispheres, right and left. We typically think of the left hemisphere of being our language hemisphere, and we typically think of our right hemisphere as doing other lovely things, visual-spatial processing, etc. There's a job for everything in the brain <laugh> , but this is to the point that neurodiversity is about us being different. And some of us just don't have the same left hemispheres, the average left hemispheres. But you still have to go to school, and learn how to read. So it seems like the stronger your right hemisphere is, the better it's able to catch that job, and help you do that job that, for whatever reason, your left hemisphere is not doing a good job supporting. That's really the macro level, the large level of thinking about this. Those of us who are in the field of monitoring this exciting work in our laboratory, we look at how children read words for meaning and sound. And it looks like children with dyslexia engage meaning more. So the parts of the brain circuits that process word meaning more so than the average readers. The average readers have heavier reliance on sound. How does the word sound? Oh, I know what the word is. And so, there's a strong grab onto the meaning, and meaningful parts of words, that helps them think about that. We start with that. Like, what changes when you learn how to read? You become better thinking about language. And it seems like children who have dyslexia have real difficulty thinking about the sounds of the words, which is really important if you wanna map sounds onto letters. Compensatory mechanisms , different parts of the brain, different cognitive strategies. You have to get there.

Susan Lambert:

You know, that's a really good segue, because we have a question from our listener mailbag from Miracle Foster, who's a teacher in Michigan, who asks, "How might recent advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology reshape our understanding of dyslexia and other reading disabilities? And what implications could these developments have for creating more effective and personalized teaching strategies?"

Ioulia Kovelman:

That is a very good one! Yes, that's perfect. That is exactly where the field is at. We can ask the entire field. The field is big, and everybody follows their own personal interests for one reason or another. Our laboratory has been focused on words. And we talk about sounds and meanings. Between sounds and meanings are lexical morphemes. Lexical morphemes are the smallest units of sound that have meaning. So a cat . That's it. It has a meaning. Cut doesn't, but cat does. And sometimes you can say snow. So snow. But now we have snowman. It's one word, but it's made out of two lexical morphemes, snow and man. Or the word undo , un and do are two different elements, but each of them is a morpheme. So there's lexical morphemes. We have known that sounds and thinking about sounds is difficult for children with dyslexia. You take a word dog, you need to know that it's do all good. You need to think about the sounds. And then you map sounds onto letters. And that's what children with dyslexia, at least initially, find really difficult. And as we talked about, the children with dyslexia seem to be learning words more or less OK. They're learning words , cats and dogs, and they can talk and have a conversation. Great. But morphemes are in between. They're neither sounds nor entire words. This is sort of like this in-between piece. And some have said, "Well, it should be part of the impairment, because children with dyslexia should have difficulties breaking words into pieces and then mapping these pieces onto orthography ." And others have said, "No, this should be a strength, because these pieces have meaning, and meaning seems to be good." So maybe that's actually a strength, and we should capitalize on that. And so that's what we've been looking at in our lab for some time. And we are really excited to see that it is a strength. There's a lot of discussion about deficits, right? This is wrong, and that is wrong. The struggle here, and the struggle there. Well, we are really excited that these elements of meaning are good and they're functioning. They're resilient. I used the word good , but they're resilient. So now, we're going to teaching strategies. We just talked that when I ask children with dyslexia to work with a word, such as snowman, they're fine. They're doing really well. And so, we are thinking that this should have direct implications for teaching instruction. You have a student, and they're struggling in breaking words into sounds, and mapping them into letters, but teach them how to break words into bigger chunks. Bigger chunks. Un and do, these are bigger chunks of undo. And if they know how to do it well, now they can grab onto the units of meaning and the units of sound, and also orthography. Think about the words magic and magician. They don't sound the same, but they are spelled the same, because you've grabbed onto these pieces. And not all morphemes are made the same. Some of them, like snowman, snow, and man, each have a meaning. And words like unlikely. Like has a meaning, but un won't stand on its own, and ly won't stand on its own. So kids with dyslexia also have difficulty with that. And we think of that as grammar. Often we don't think about that as sounds. But it's kind of grammatical, because it's so abstract. And we don't always teach it even to average children. We don't usually have systematic construction in morphology. We think, "Oh, well, they speak English, they can speak it . They know it." Well, some of them are smart enough and they'll figure it out with enough experience. But even an average reader does better when you teach them, explicitly, this is what this is, this is how it is put together. Here's the un and here's how it works in English. And if you put them to a verb, now you've undone it. You've uninvited somebody. So it's important. And kids with dyslexia struggle with that. And again, we're back to instruction now. You have to help them with that. We see that the kinds of circuits, brain circuits, that do not work well for sound are the same circuits that do not work well for these abstract morphemes, like on , on and raw . And I was visiting UT Dallas just the other week, and I met with a colleague, Dr. Julia Evans, and we had this exact conversation. She is also a speech therapist. And she said, "Oh, this makes perfect sense. I was working with a child, who has a language problem, and I was showing them pictures. I give you a word, and you give me a new word. I give you a word, teach, and you give me a word, teacher. I give you a word, paint, and you give me a word, painter. I give you a word jog, and then the child says, "Cool aerobics lady.""

Susan Lambert:

<Laugh>.

Ioulia Kovelman:

Right, this is what we're talking about. When a child with language or reading problems quickly put together a word made out of words, they can make words . They're not stupid. They're smart. All children are smart. They can make new words. But, you were expecting jogger, a grammatical form. Instead, you got a cool aerobics lady , which is what we call a compound word . So there's a strength, and there's a deficit. And now you know where you have something that's resilient, and something that's fragile and you have to help them .

Susan Lambert:

That's a great example.

Ioulia Kovelman:

That's from a therapy session, to brain imaging, to intervention. 1, 2, 3.

Susan Lambert:

We'll look at that. Shoutout to Miracle for such a great question. Thank you so much for that. And our listeners can submit other literacy questions too . We're excited about other ones we might get. Let's make a little bit of a shift from the differences between typically developing kids and neurodiverse to the brains of monolingual and bilingual children. Because that's also a hot topic too. Are there differences there that we should know about?

Ioulia Kovelman:

There are, and there are very interesting. And for good reasons. There are differences between languages. And that's just how we roll . We do not inherit language from our parents. It's a good thing, because then we can make new words. Look, we've got iPhones, and we've got all sorts of cool stuff, and we can come up with new words, morphology, right? So we make all this new stuff, like cool aerobics ladies . But the other part of it is that we have different languages. We didn't inherit language from our parents. We only inherited the ability to have language. So language is a difference, and because language is different, orthography is a difference. There is a link between language and orthography , and maybe that's for a different conversation. But the end result is that in Spanish, when you hear gato, you are going to spell gato. In English, when you hear neighbor, I don't know what you're gonna spell. I cannot even spell it out. I'm sorry.

Susan Lambert:

< Laugh > .

Ioulia Kovelman:

And I feel very sorry for all the English speakers who have to deal with this every single day. In fact, of all the alphabetic languages, English is about the worst for sound -letter mappings. And it takes English-speaking children the longest to figure it out, compared to French, Italian, German, Greek, alphabetic languages. It takes English speakers a very long time, compared to other languages, to do this. Now, this is how we know kids are reading differently. If I grab a first grade child in Italy, and I give them a nonsense word like something they don't know what it is, like blickit, and I ask them to read it. They'll read it by the end of grade one or two. Most Italian and Spanish and Greek kids can do it , no problem. It takes English-speaking kids to be in grade five before they're there. It takes a long time. I mean, of course they can do something, but really to get to a level of high proficiency it takes many years, because words like neighbor, night , they will throw you off. And so it takes you a long time to learn different patterns. And be trustful of the patterns you see. We know that when Italian folks read these nonwords, they activate parts of the brain that are close to our hearing parts of the brain. It's in the temporal lobe , right where your ear is. It's easy. Letters have sounds. Sounds have letters. Piece of cake. English speakers, when they're faced with this problem of reading a word they've never seen before, and that they took longer to figure out how to do, will activate the frontal lobe, that's where your eyebrows are at. This is a hard problem. The frontal lobe is our heavy-duty thinking part of the brain. It's a hard problem. It turns out, when you look at children who are bilingual in language, such as Spanish and English, you get the same difference. When they're doing a phonological reading task in Spanish, they have what's called functional connectivity, the way parts of the brain play with each other. So this happens for them in the temporal lobe, where the ear is at, which is what happens to monolingual Italians. And then if you look at the English in the same child, it's the frontal lobe, it's where your eyebrows are at . That's what we find for monolingual. It's one child, but they have two languages, and they have two systems. So that is important. The bilingual child can actually develop two systems, depending on what their language demands. The second thing that happens is that proficiency. People think, "Oh, phonology is easy." Blickit, you don't know what blickit is, but you can tell how many syllables are in the word blickit. Two, piece of cake. You don't know, it could have been a Russian word. You don't know. But you can segment it. It's a universal skill . It should transfer between one language to the other language. In theory. It turns out that even though the same parts of the brain are active, if you do not have systematic instruction in that language, it doesn't develop as well. So we look at children, we'll call them heritage-language speakers. This means they're learning to read in English, but at home they speak a different language. In the state of Michigan, we don't have bilingual schools. They go to school in English. Their mom and dad might be teaching them how to read in Spanish, and how to read in Chinese or Russian, but they're not getting as much instruction. And we see differences. We take the same phonological task, we give them the word blickit, they break it into syllables. Piece of cake. Seems to be really easy. Should transfer easily. No. If the child didn't have instruction in that language, we see not just the left and the right activate, it's all active because it's a hard task. They're not used to segmenting words into sounds in that language, because they don't have formal literacy instruction. So people say, "Oh, piece of cake, I'm gonna learn this in Spanish and transfer into English." A little, yes but you still need instruction in that language. Some of it transfers, but that by itself is not enough. Yes, children can learn to read in multiple languages. Yes, their brain can configure for these different languages. And no, it doesn't transfer magically in a way that doesn't require instruction in the other language. You need to become a bilingual reader. You have to have bilingual literacy instruction.

Susan Lambert:

So no matter what language, you need explicit instruction in that language?

Ioulia Kovelman:

You need explicit instruction. And if you do, then miracles begin to happen. We have looked at children who are heritage-language speakers. And when you compare two children, and we're no longer talking about dyslexia, we have the same two nine-year-olds. They're both bilingual Chinese-English speakers, or Spanish-English speakers. And they know the same number of words in English. And they can read the same number of words in English. And they look indistinguishable. But one child has a little bit of Chinese, or a little bit of Spanish, and the other child has a lot. The child who has a lot, I'm gonna look at their brain, and I'm gonna look at how their brain reacts to language. Even though they're matched for English, the child who knows their home language better, their brain systems are more mature for language. They're better developed for language. So there's addition, right? So we talk about transfer. Of course knowing a little bit in one language will help you with the other language, clearly, right?

Susan Lambert:

Yep. Yep .

Ioulia Kovelman:

It's like in sports, if you know how to throw a ball, you'll know how to do other physical activities. The brain is the same way. Skills will transfer, but it'll also strengthen you. In the state of Michigan, Michael Phelps was our star swimmer. But then, how do you become a good swimmer? Do you swim all day? Or do you also take a break to do some jogging and weight lifting ? We call it CrossFit these days. You want your body to be strong. And so languages are like that. We talked about languages being different. They're exercising slightly different muscles of your language system. Isn't that cool?

Susan Lambert:

That is very cool.

Ioulia Kovelman:

So a bilingual person has an exercise in language. They have an exercise in different elements of that language. Hmm . It's like the things that are not very obvious in English, maybe are more obvious in Spanish. Maybe more obvious in Chinese. And then they have to resolve conflicts in language. I say it this way in one language, but a different way in the other language. So their brain has to resolve all these things. So it's an exercise. Good physiotherapy for your brain .

Susan Lambert:

That is so fascinating. I'd love for you to just tell us just a little bit about your lab, the Language and Literacy Lab. Because you do a lot of this work, and do a lot of this study right there in that Language and Literacy Lab. Correct?

Ioulia Kovelman:

Yes.

Susan Lambert:

Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Ioulia Kovelman:

We welcome children. We usually look at elementary school children. We look at average readers. We look at struggling readers. We look at folks who struggle with language. These are called language-based learning differences. And we look at kids who speak English at home, or they speak Chinese at home, and they speak Spanish at home as well as English. And we take the reading process, and we break it down. Same things that the teachers are asking. How do they learn how to read words? How do they learn to read sentences? How do they learn to read stories? That's what we do. We have the kids come in, and we have them do word reading exercises, or sentence understanding exercises, or text exercises in addition to what people typically do at school. We also put neuroimaging equipment around their heads. We use optical brain imaging. That's the kind of equipment that's in your Fitbit or your Apple Watch, whatever is in your smartwatch. If folks have one on and they take it off, you'll see a light in it. There's a flashing light inside. That light detects changes in the color of your blood. That's how these gizmos know your heart rate. They're called pulse oximeters, that's the fancy word in the hospital, but these are embedded in your smartwatches, and they tell you the changes in the color of your blood. Now, your smartwatch usually has just one of these lights. We put a whole bunch of them into a cap and put it on the kid's head. Now we're watching the whole head.

Susan Lambert:

Wow.

Ioulia Kovelman:

When you put this around the head, it's telling us changes in the brain function. Because parts of the brain, when they get busy doing word reading exercises, they need more oxygen, and that changes the drawing of the oxygen, changes the color of the blood. We measure that difference. That's how we know how a child's brain works while they're basically wearing this giant Fitbit around their heads.

Susan Lambert:

And we'll put a link in the show notes for our listeners, because you actually have a video of that on the website that you can go and see what this thing looks like. It's fascinating!

Ioulia Kovelman:

Well, thank you. We also think this is really cool. It's a very simple method. We're just measuring changes in light. We use light to do it, we made changes in color. And everybody's wearing one of these these days. And we just have a lot of them embedded into like a little band. And the band goes around the kids' heads, and then they go on and they do what they'd usually do in the classroom, but then we watch how their brain functions.

Susan Lambert:

That's cool. Do you explain to the kids what's happening when you're putting this thing on?

Ioulia Kovelman:

Yes, we do. Of course. We show them. If they are interested, they can see on the screen how the signal goes when they do things. We show this to the parents.

Susan Lambert:

Wow, that's so cool. They must just feel like they're doing something really important when they're there.

Ioulia Kovelman:

I hope so. We tell them they're helping new brain scientists. They're helping teachers. And they're helping students. And they're helping kids who struggle. And, of course, they're informing science. They get the merits of being scientists. It's terrific! I'm a parent to , and I have small children, and I have groceries, and dirty dishes, and all the things you have to do on your weekend or after work. And so, I'm in awe and infinitely grateful for every parent who takes two hours of their time to come and support research. Kids get gifts, and we compensate people, but I don't think that really is truly compensating people for what they do.

Susan Lambert:

Yeah.

Ioulia Kovelman:

And just a shoutout to everybody who has ever participated in a research study. 'Cause that's a huge service to all of us.

Susan Lambert:

Yeah, for sure. A quick question about that. What you do in your lab, and what you're finding out, there isn't always a direct connection to what teachers should be doing in the classroom, right? What kind of steps have to happen next before it's like, "Oh, we know this thing, and teachers here's some guidance for maybe how you can impact your instruction?"

Ioulia Kovelman:

Correct. Correct. And I want people to think about medicine. The chemist goes into a lab and synthesizes something. And then goes over to a biologist and says, "Hey, can we try this on a mouse model?" So, before human trials, we do something in a Petri dish, something in an animal, and then we have human volunteers come in and try it out. We usually think there's about 15 years between research. And that's when we think we have the drug. Now , mind years of discovery and work with the Petri dishes . But once the chemists and the biologists have agreed, where the science team says, "OK, we think this is the drug," This is when they connect with medical professionals and do clinical trials. We think there's a decade that goes by between all of these trials and actual implementation, when your doctor will prescribe it to you, or it's a new surgical procedure, and whatnot. So you have to think about this in similar terms. There's a linguist, maybe there's a cognitive scientist. And again, something in their Petri dish comes up and they say, "Hey, let's go talk to a teacher and see if that makes sense to them." And again, it might be an education scientist, and so that education scientist could say, "Well, we have this literacy approach, we have that literacy approach, but this is something new, and maybe this will work better than this or that." And then it goes into, "Well, let's approach this principal and try it out in one classroom. And then you go to school in a district. Unfortunately, these are not fast, because there are are the steps. But then you wouldn't wanna be poisoned with the drug. In the same way, you do not wanna be misled. Because once something's implemented, it's implemented. The teachers are trained, the textbooks are published, the school districts are subscribed to it. And then if it's wrong, as some people know, sometimes we have done things that are wrong, and then it takes another decade to undo.

Susan Lambert:

That's a great point. It's a really good point. I think we talk a lot about the preponderance of evidence. That's what you were talking about is different types of evidence, and from different points of view. And science is slow moving. It takes time. We have to sometimes be patient with it. But we're not always patient people, are we?

Ioulia Kovelman:

Well, you have just seen with COVID sometimes emergencies happen and we really put in a huge effort. You have seen this was a worldwide effort. Really not a singular country. Not a singular land. This was a worldwide effort, where people came together. What if we have a literacy crisis? And we do in many places.In the state of Michigan, we have some of the lowest reading scores in the country. So what if we called it a crisis and said, "look, just like COVID, we have to have something and we have to have it in a year and not in 12 years." And throw the same kinds of money as we threw at COVID.

Susan Lambert:

Well, as we're wrapping up, do you have any final thoughts for our listeners? Anything that you want educators to really take away from this conversation? Words of wisdom?

Ioulia Kovelman:

Oh, not at all. Science is informed by teachers and children, as I just gave you an example, that cool aerobics lady, right ? This is what teachers see in the classroom. This is what therapist see in their sessions, us in their brain science. We could be looking at this like staring at the stars forever. So there needs to be a dialogue. It's interdisciplinary. It has to be a child, parent, teacher , researchers, at multiple levels, because it's a loop. We're all together. And I do not teach children, and teachers don't usually do science, but we have to find ways of connecting with each other.

Susan Lambert:

That's great. Well, Ioulia, it's been such a pleasure. We can't wait to have you back and to do some deep dives into some more things that you're doing. Thanks for the work that you do, and thanks for being willing to chat with us. And I will encourage our listeners to go to the links in the show notes so they can check out your lab.

Ioulia Kovelman:

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Susan Lambert:

That was Ioulia Kovelman, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. Check out the show notes for links to learn much more about the exciting work at the Language and Literacy Lab. We also have a link to our recent mini series , exploring how the Science of Reading serves multilingual and English learners. Remember to submit your own literacy questions by visiting amplify.com/sormailbag. Your question could be answered on the show. And by submitting a question, you could also win a visit from me to your school. Next time on the show, we'll hear from 2024 National Teacher of the Year, Missy Testerman, a longtime first and second grade teacher who decided to get her ESL endorsement at 51 years old.

Missy Testerman:

Anytime someone gets moved in a school setting, you'll hear that, "Are they making you move?" Or, "They're making you go to ESL?" And so I think some people were thinking that they made her move. No one made me move. I signed up. I willingly wanted to make this move, because I wanted to make sure these families, these precious students, had someone to be their advocate.

Susan Lambert:

That's next time. The best way to get new episodes is to subscribe to Science of Reading: The Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please leave us a rating and review. We'd also appreciate it if you shared our reading reboot with some friends and colleagues. You can join the conversation about this episode in our Facebook discussion group, Science of Reading: The Community. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.