Across socioeconomic levels, one in five children struggles with learning to read or write because of a learning disability. That’s why two SPU School of Education professors, Dr. William Nagy and Dr. Scott Beers, are collaborating with University of Washington researchers on the new Center for Defining and Treating Specific Learning Disabilities in Written Language at the University of Washington.
University of Washington professor and researcher Dr. Virginia Berninger is leading the center in its goals to define specific learning disabilities and to better diagnose specific learning disabilities in children whose development is otherwise normal.
The interdisciplinary project, which began in December 2011 and is planned to continue through November 2016, includes researchers from the UW College of Education’s educational psychology division and UW Health Science’s departments of radiology, medicine, and medical genetics. The center is funded by a five-year, $8.1 million grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
The center seeks to create and evaluate computerized instructional interventions to help students with and without specific learning disabilities meet state and common core standards in literacy. The researchers are focusing on teaching approaches for children in grades four through nine who struggle with specific writing or reading skills, including handwriting, spelling, reading words, comprehension, and putting words together in writing.
Dr. Nagy initially collaborated with the center in the development of instructional materials for these computerized interventions. The interventions are currently being implemented with local students and data is being collected on the success of the curriculum.
Currently, he is collaborating on a special issue for the Journal of Learning Disabilities on the topic of morphological awareness and literacy acquisition, with the goal of synthesizing and expanding the knowledge base. This special issue will include studies on morphology (how words are formed) in conjunction with comprehension, syntactic awareness, and reading and writing development of students.
Dr. Beers has been working since the summer of 2012 on data collection. By comparing the process of writing through both handwriting and keyboarding and tracking eye movement, he is examining the process of writing, looking at both the progression of the writing piece and the final product. He is exploring the students’ rhythm of writing and is interested in the processes that cause language bursts or pauses.
As data is collected, both Dr. Beers and Dr. Nagy will assist with data analysis and writing up the results for publication. Both professors plan to present some of the results from the center at upcoming scholarly conferences; Dr. Beers will present findings at an international writing conference in February 2014 in Paris.
The SPU School of Education applauds both Dr. Nagy and Dr. Beers in their collaborative efforts to further research in literacy and learning disabilities, and to help students be more successful in learning to read and write.