Webinar: Tackle Learning Loss with the Science of Reading

Originally Broadcasted on
Tuesday, April 20, 2021
Webinar: Tackle Learning Loss with the Science of Reading.

Thank you to all who attended our webinar. For those who missed it, watch our recorded webinar and join neuroscientist Dr. Martha Burns as she talks through three big challenges behind addressing learning loss: equity, engagement, and efficacy, and how edtech can help address these challenges.

During this webinar with Dr. Martha Burns, you will: 

• Identify under-served students’ cognitive needs for accelerating learning
• Learn the role of social-emotional learning in reading gains
• Be prepared to plan for learning recovery based on brain science research

Q&A

Have you considered how children learn visually and what is the effect on literacy around that?

There is a tremendous amount of research I am sure you’re probably aware of it, with the impact of auditory capacities, auditory attention, auditory working memory, auditory processing speed on reading. In an alphabetic language, as you well know, you have to decode. You have to perceive the difference between a “ba, da, ca, ta” if you’re going to be able to figure out which letter goes with which, but you also have to be able to do two things: –

• You have to recognize the letters and recall the letters and recall the sounds that go with the letters
• You also have to be able to track from left to right.

And there has been research on that. The Fast Forword program has exercises built-in that actually exercise not only auditory skills, but visual skills. There are tasks, a couple of the reading components of Fast Forword where students have to track from left to right as words cross the page from left to right, and they have to hold in mind a word that they see or hear and then as other words cross the page, they have to hold that in mind, and then maintain their attention and click it on. So, in that is based on some of the research on the importance of visual processing, as well as auditory processing.

Dr. Martha Burns, Director of Neuroscience Education