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

传统上，学习阅读的早期阶段被认为是一个基本上记忆大量规则的过程，这些规则用于将页面上的标记转换为可以与有意义的想法和概念联系起来的声音。 毕竟，这是我们通常教孩子阅读的方式。 然而，虽然这些规则显然是一个重要的教育工具，但许多心理学家现在认为学习阅读是一个编码书面字母和声音之间的统计关系的过程，而不是明确的规则。 大脑能够识别不同信息集之间的复杂相关性，即使这些相关性不容易描述。 成功的阅读策略很可能在很大程度上依赖于这种能力。 因此，学习阅读更像是一种技能，而不是一套知识--它可能更像是学习投篮，而不是记忆一系列项目。 由爱荷华州大学的罗伯特·麦克默里艾略特·哈泽尔廷领导的一个研究小组将调查如何利用已知的影响技能学习的因素来提高阅读能力。他们将操纵单词的组织方式和呈现给学生的方式，以找到使相关学习机制使用的关键统计数据明确的方法。 这些实验将确定可用于改善我们如何教孩子阅读的方法。 阅读是一项基本技能，为接下来的整个课程奠定基础。 因此，儿童阅读能力的提高对他们在学校和社会中的表现具有广泛和持久的影响。 此外，由于阅读是一种复杂的、几乎普遍的行为，它为研究人类如何更普遍地学习复杂任务提供了一个很好的模型任务。

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.