Scaling learning theory to multiple pathways: Early reading as a model system

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Traditionally, the early stages of learning to read were considered a process of essentially memorizing the large set of rules for translating the marks on the page into sounds that can be linked to meaningful ideas and concepts. This, after all, is the way we typically teach our children to read. However, while these rules are clearly an important educational tool, many psychologists now view learning to read as a process of encoding the statistical relationships between written letters and sounds rather than explicit rules. The brain is capable of identifying complex correlations between diverse sets of information even when these correlations are not easily describable. Successful reading strategies are likely to rely heavily on this ability. As a result, learning to read is more of a skill than a set of knowledge -- it may be more like learning to shoot a basketball than like memorizing a list of items. A research team led by Robert McMurray & Eliot Hazeltine at the University of Iowa will investigate how factors known to affect skill learning can be harnessed to improve reading ability. They will manipulate the ways in which words are organized and presented to students to find the approach that makes the critical statistics used by the relevant learning mechanisms explicit. The experiments will identify approaches that can be used to improve how we teach reading to children. Reading is a foundational skill, laying the groundwork for the entire curriculum that follows. Thus, improvements in children's reading ability can have widespread and lasting impact for their performance in school and in society in general. Additionally, because reading is an elaborate and nearly universal behavior, it provides an excellent model task for studying how humans learn complex tasks more generally.