Language and Literacy

�� education scholars launch new academic journal focused on Black life, language, and culture

Carrie Spector — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 17:46:20 +0000

�� education scholars launch new academic journal focused on Black life, language, and culture

Carrie Spector Tue, 10/21/2025 - 10:46

A new academic journal based at �� explores Black language and culture through a multitude of disciplines. (Illustration: Mary Long / iStock)

Announcements | Diversity and Identity | Language and Literacy

The journal, a project of the GSE’s Black Academic Development Lab, crosses disciplines to advance research and conversation on Black identity and cultural practices.

October 22, 2025

By Carrie Spector

A new scholarly journal with a home base at �� is making its debut this fall, taking a unique approach to the study of Black life, language, and culture.

The Journal of Black Language and Culture (JBLAC) is the first publication of its kind to approach its theme through a multitude of disciplines, bridging research areas that are typically siloed in academia, the editors said.

“We’re challenging the traditional boundaries of language and culture research, with a focus that just isn’t found in other journals,” said Anne Charity Hudley, a professor and associate dean of educational affairs at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), who serves as the journal’s lead editor. “There are journals that focus on linguistics or culture separately, but we’re offering a space where they’re fully interconnected – where language practices are centered as both a product and shaper of Black cultural life.”

The open-access, peer-reviewed journal will begin publishing in early 2026, with articles including an analysis of teacher survey data on African American language in STEM, an exploration of Black community identification at a historically white university, and a study of how Black linguistic and cultural practices can support communities affected by diabetes.

The journal will host a series of webinars beginning on Nov. 7, including guidance for submissions, applying to join the editorial board, and introductions to special themes for upcoming issues.

JBLAC is a project of the GSE’s Black Academic Development (BAD) Lab, a collective of scholars from universities across the country, led by Charity Hudley. The journal is published by Cambridge University Press in partnership with the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), making it one of four major journals sponsored by the LSA.

Anne Charity Hudley

Building on decades of research

�� is a fitting home for the journal, the editors said, given decades of scholarship on Black language and culture from faculty at the university such as Arnetha Ball, John Baugh, and John Rickford.

“So much research has come out of �� from these scholars and all the students they’ve worked with over the years,” Charity Hudley said. “But there wasn’t a journal specifically designed to address it. Early on we didn’t think there was enough work to necessarily sustain a journal, but we’ve had so many more people in this generation doing research in this area that it seemed like it was time.”

The launch of JBLAC also builds on last year’s departmentalization of the African and African American Studies program at ��.

“The journal is an enterprise that’s aligned with the goals of the institution to grow that space, and it gives our new department an anchor,” Charity Hudley said.

JBLAC fills a gap in the current landscape of academic journals, the editors said, by explicitly connecting the study of Black language practices with cultural life and identity. Other journals that publish work on African linguistics, for example, don’t often include the cultural specificities of Black life, they said, and those focused on Black culture and social structures frequently overlook the role that language plays.

The motivation to develop JBLAC grew largely out of experiences Charity Hudley and other scholars shared in submitting papers to journals focused on a discipline such as linguistics or anthropology, and being told the work was outside the scope of that publication. With JBLAC, the editors aim to mitigate those disciplinary boundaries and lift barriers that scholars of Black language and culture often face in publishing their work.

In addition to an editorial board providing primary oversight for the journal’s direction and focus, JBLAC has a board of senior advisors and reviewers representing a range of disciplines, including education, sociology, communication, and disability studies.

To help demystify the process of academic publishing for undergraduate and graduate students, the editors also established fellowship programs that get students involved in soliciting, reviewing, and editing submissions.

“A big theme of the BAD Lab is collaboration, and this project is collaborative in a way that’s not commonly done at academic journals,” said Mia Harris, social science researcher at the BAD Lab and managing editor of JBLAC. “These spaces have historically been closed to marginalized folks, and when it comes to how to navigate these frameworks of finding a journal that suits your work and getting published, we’ve been really intentional about educating as we go.”

Expanding the perception of linguistics

The editors plan to publish 20-24 articles a year on an ongoing basis as pieces are accepted. In addition to empirical studies and more theoretical articles considering existing research, the editorial team is interested in pieces written by and for students for classroom use (both K-12 and college level), and “how did you do that?” articles that share practical, behind-the-scenes insights into conducting Black language and culture research.

They identified a set of rubrics for evaluating submissions, including whether the ideas involve a scholarly area concerning both Black language and culture, how comprehensively the author considers the implications of the work for the lived experiences of Black people, and whether the work would be of interest to readers across disciplines.

Upcoming issues are slated to take on special themes, such as Black media, academic freedom, and the language and literacies of Africana spirituality.

The editors said they hope to expand the public understanding of what the field of linguistics can involve, and to encourage dialogue among scholars in linguistics and other fields that contribute to the study of Black language and culture.

“A lot of people are doing language and culture work without realizing it – they might be looking at rap music, or the way Black language is informing social and digital media, like Black Twitter,” said Harris. “Our hope is that JBLAC can be a space for folks who are doing this work in different corners to come together and have more of a community.”

In celebration of its launch, the journal will host a series of webinars beginning on Nov. 7, when the JBLAC editorial team will share an overview of the journal’s mission, scope, and goals. Learn more and register.

JBLAC managing editor Mia Harris, pictured here fourth from left, with (l-r) GSE doctoral student Kevin Anderson, a graduate fellow with JBLAC; Lionnell Smith, assistant editor of JBLAC; and Ericka Cannon and Jaylen PIttman, both GSE doctoral students and JBLAC graduate fellows. The editors established fellowship programs to build undergraduate and graduate students' involvement and help demystify the process of academic publishing.

Research Stories

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Anne Harper Charity Hudley

How language bias persists in scientific publishing despite AI tools

Carrie Spector — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 17:35:18 +0000

How language bias persists in scientific publishing despite AI tools

Carrie Spector Thu, 06/19/2025 - 10:35

While large language models can help authors overcome some language barriers, a study by GSE researchers suggests that bias against non-native speakers persists even with the use of these tools. (Photo: Adobe Stock)

Language and Literacy | Technology

�� education researchers highlight the ongoing challenges of language discrimination in academic publishing, revealing that AI tools may not be the solution for non-native speakers.

June 15, 2025

By Scott Hadly

For now, English remains the lingua franca of indexed science, dominating most peer-reviewed journals and international conferences. This puts non-native speakers at a significant disadvantage. While large language models can assist authors to help overcome some language barriers, a new study by two researchers with the �� Graduate School of Education suggests that bias against non-native speakers persists even when these tools are used.

Peer reviewers, increasingly attentive to the use of LLMs in scientific writing, may infer that LLM use is related to author country of origin. These inferences may consciously or unconsciously bias peer reviewers’ scientific assessments, according to new research by �� PhD candidate Haley Lepp and postdoctoral scholar Daniel Scott Smith.

The �� Institute for Human-Centered AI provided a seed grant for their research, which was accepted for publication at this summer’s Association for Computing Machinery conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. Their paper, 'You Cannot Sound Like GPT’: Signs of language discrimination and resistance in computer science publishing, is also available now on the pre-print server arXiv.

The work highlights how linguistic biases can persist even with the adoption of AI tools and other technology.

“So if you have a subconscious bias against people from China, for example, that bias will emerge in other ways, even as language is adjusted [with LLMs]. That’s the surprising takeaway from this study,” Lepp said.

The researchers looked at nearly 80,000 peer reviews at a large computer science conference and found evidence of bias against authors from countries where English is less widely spoken. After ChatGPT became available, there was only a muted change in the expression of that bias. Through interviews with 14 conference participants from around the world, Lepp and Smith found that reviewers may use common LLM phrases in papers to infer author language backgrounds, affecting their judgments on research quality. Overall, the study shows how ChatGPT might reinforce stereotypes that equate good English with good scientific work.

Lepp, a former natural language processing engineer and digital education practitioner, holds an MS in computational linguistics from the University of Washington and a BS in science, technology, and international affairs from Georgetown University. Her research now focuses on the influence of natural language processing on educational practice. Smith holds a PhD from �� and will be starting as an assistant professor of sociology at Duke in the fall.

Why did you and [Daniel Scott Smith] decide to study how LLMs illustrate bias in science journal publishing and also contribute to that bias against non-native English speakers?

We noticed that discussions about scientists using LLMs for English focused on authors rather than readers. So that idea of LLMs as an intervention for scientists puts the onus of change on the authors whose first language isn’t English, rather than on the root causes of peer reviewers’ biases.

In education, there’s rich literature about language ideology and the role of the listener or reader in linguistic bias. We cite this paper by Flores and Rosa, who describe how racialized language varieties in American schools are seen as deficits to overcome. Even when students change their writing or speaking, the students continue to experience bias. The source of the bias is deeper than the language itself, and so we wondered if that theory would hold up among international scientists.

One would assume that LLMs could help solve this problem, but your paper indicates that ChatGPT only slightly mutes the bias against non-native English-speaking scientists. Why do you think it hasn’t removed more of that bias?

The expression of bias appeared not so much around the rules of “Academic English” but around what people associated with the kind of scientist who would break such rules. Interviewees described how language quality could be a proxy for science quality.

After ChatGPT came out, peer reviewers noticed that grammatical idiosyncrasies in writing generally started to disappear. Peer reviewers described how instead, they came to guess that certain words or phrases common in LLMs – like “delve” – came from authors from non-English-speaking countries. These guesses also often came with stereotyped descriptions of scientists from different countries.

Looking beyond your work, do you think AI will be a democratizing technology or will it exacerbate inequality?

It depends on your theory of democracy. Daniel Greene and others have critiqued the “access doctrine” that suggests bringing people access to technology improves democracy. I’m not sure I buy that access is inherently democratizing. If anything, the idea of AI as democratizing can justify the idea that existing social inequalities can be solved by “fixing” marginalized people, rather than looking at how the people at the top, or even social institutions, might be contributing to inequalities. Our findings offer a kind of alternative view. Even when people have tools to act more like a dominant social group, new mechanisms of stratification may emerge.

What do you hope people take away from the paper?

We must interrogate the way that people use language, not just to communicate content but as a sign of other things: of race, class, who to trust, or whose knowledge can be trusted. In science, English-only publishing has a long history with connections to colonialism and racist academic institutions. To repair that, we’ll need more than a tool for helping people produce English text.

One of the things we emphasize in the paper is that biases we identify are actually, in many ways, tools for efficiency. The current speed of computer science publishing may contribute to people cutting corners, evaluating science based on writing style and perception of author background rather than on the science described.

This story was originally published by the �� Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Research Stories

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�� team builds tool to keep young readers from falling through the cracks

Carrie Spector — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 19:34:00 +0000

�� team builds tool to keep young readers from falling through the cracks

Carrie Spector Thu, 02/13/2025 - 11:34

Jason Yeatman, founder of ROAR, a free, open-access reading assessment now being used in 23 states. (Photo: Ryan Zhang)

K-12 | Language and Literacy | Learning Differences

Associate Professor Jason Yeatman discusses the adoption of the ��-developed Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR) as an approved dyslexia screening tool in the state of California.

February 12, 2025

By Isabel Sacks

Starting next fall, the state of California will mandate universal screening for reading difficulties in kindergarten, first, and second grades. When reading difficulties are identified early, schools can determine what support students need as they progress through their education and they are less likely to fall behind. The new policy approved four reading assessments for districts to use to screen their students: one, conceived and developed at ��.

The Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR), founded by �� Accelerator for Learning Faculty Affiliate Jason Yeatman, is an automated, fully online tool that enables schools to test their entire student body in the time it normally takes them to test one student. The tool, which has been shown to be highly predictive of gold standard reading screeners in validation studies, is free, open-access, and currently being used in hundreds of schools in 23 states. Assessment data is stored securely and separately from identifiers wherever possible, and schools receive interactive score reports in real time to support their instruction. The ROAR research team also creates professional development tools to help teachers interpret and use the test results.

The Accelerator has helped ROAR expand its reach and strengthen its infrastructure by providing engineering and technical support, facilitating and brokering school and district partnerships, and helping refine its scaling approach.

After nearly four years of research and development, and expanding its library of assessments to test a range of skills in reading and language, visual processing, and executive function, ROAR is going to scale, as schools around the state of California and the country clamor to use it. We spoke with Yeatman, who is an associate professor of education, pediatrics, and psychology at ��, about this pivotal moment for the tool.

What need was ROAR designed to fill?

We have a dual mission: there is a service and impact side and then a research side. The high-level mission that really excites me is building more bridges between research and practice, by aligning the questions that researchers are asking to real challenges faced by educators, and then creating a pipeline to bring that cutting-edge research into practice.

Our goal when it comes to schools is to lift the resource constraint for reading assessment, which is typically time consuming and resource intensive. It conventionally involves teachers administering assessments one-on-one to every student in the class, scoring those assessments, and entering those scores into a database so the data can be used for making decisions. Teachers have to spend hours training and schools have to create complex systems for how assessments are done. This means a lot of resources are being spent on professional development and data collection as opposed to what's really important: using the data to help kids. Now, schools can spend 20 minutes to deploy ROAR across the whole district and get automated scores in real time. Teachers immediately see that information and can start using it to make instructional decisions.

Can you talk about ROAR’s journey to achieving this milestone towards scale?

I see this milestone as an exciting opportunity to connect research, practice, and policy. This new policy, to test all young readers in the state, emerged from the advocacy work of the dyslexia community around California; many other states had similar legislation already. I would really like to see more connections between ongoing research, policy, and what’s making it into schools.

When the call for applications came out last summer, there was a window of about eight weeks to submit the application. During that time, that application was my personal focus, with support from the whole ROAR team, because we wanted ROAR to be on the table as an option for schools in our home state. It opened up an incredible opportunity to do the same work we’ve been doing, but at a much larger scale.

As the years go by, a larger goal of mine is to help schools go beyond just complying with existing legislation and work with them to be a part of crafting future policies. These are the partnerships that are most exciting for me, when forward-thinking districts work with researchers to build a more effective system of support – maybe we’ll look up in five years and have a new policy that is crafted by these learnings.

How have your partnerships with schools impacted the development of ROAR?

We are a team of cognitive neuroscientists that are studying the variety of interacting factors that lead to challenges with reading, and we're trying to gain a more detailed understanding of the mechanisms that contribute to reading development. Sometimes we come in with our own hypotheses and look for schools that might be interested in exploring them with us, but we also try to bring schools into the collaborative co-design of our research questions.

Our current research is the synthesis of many ideas and challenges that schools are facing, where they want better answers to their pressing challenges. As a concrete example, a big focus right now is understanding best practices for supporting multilingual learners. This is a question that teachers face and that school administrators face, depending on the educational context in the school. This has really propelled ROAR toward developing and validating assessments across multiple languages. I'm thinking with the schools about how to best combine the data from these various measures to support their teachers.

How has ROAR helped us do better research?

ROAR allows us to do research at a previously unprecedented scale and make sure that we're doing research that reflects the true diversity of learners around the United States. Now, when my lab poses a research question, we can make sure that our study is not just a convenience sample of students in Palo Alto, but really reflects the diversity of students around the country, teachers around the country, and the diversity of experiences that students are having.

ROAR is also supporting research beyond our lab. For instance, ROAR has been used by researchers at other universities that study brain development and reading, to collect assessment data before participants come into the lab. It’s also been used by international researchers that are interested in comparing reading development across languages and instructional contexts.

What do you hope ROAR’s impact will be?

It’s a dance between scale and impact, and over what timeline. For me, research is the best way to have a long-term impact. ROAR isn’t just for grades K-2, it was designed and validated for use up to grade 12 to screen for reading challenges. We want districts to not just test kids in K-2 to comply with legislation, but we want them to screen in upper elementary and middle school as well, because we know a lot of students are slipping through the cracks. That’s one way that I hope research will have an impact: making sure that a second grader who was flagged as having serious reading challenges receives extra support, and doesn't become the third grader, fourth grader, or fifth grader who hasn’t had the opportunity to achieve their full potential. While I’d like for ROAR to be on the approved screener list in every state in the country, it goes beyond getting ROAR to the largest number of people to how ROAR can bring a spotlight to this issue and impact the education system more broadly.

What comes next for ROAR?

I see California’s adoption of ROAR as ushering in a sea change in how the school system bridges research and practice, and an opportunity to improve equity and efficiency of screening for all the children of California. We’re offering a different model for districts, that’s not just purchasing a product from a company, but an opportunity to align their practices to research and be a part of steering future research, which in turn, means being a part of sculpting future products and policies. We also hope that over the next five years, ROAR will contribute to the development of new reading interventions to advance learning for all.

Jason Yeatman is an associate professor in the �� Graduate School of Education, the �� School of Humanities and Sciences, and the �� School of Medicine.

ROAR has received support from �� Impact Labs, the ��-Sequoia K-12 Research Collaborative, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF), the Klingenstein Foundation, and the Robertson Foundation.

Research Stories

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Jason Yeatman

Learners with disabilities benefit from more complex reading instruction, �� researchers say

Carrie Spector — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 20:20:59 +0000

Learners with disabilities benefit from more complex reading instruction, �� researchers say

Carrie Spector Wed, 01/15/2025 - 12:20

Research shows that students with disabilities such as autism and Down syndrome can learn to read independently through an approach that includes phonics, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. (Photo: iStock)

Language and Literacy | Learning Differences | Teaching

�� education scholars Chris Lemons and Lakshmi Balasubramanian share strategies for helping students with intellectual and developmental disabilities learn to read.

January 16, 2025

By Carrie Spector

Students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) such as autism and Down syndrome are often left behind when it comes to literacy instruction – casualties of the misperception that at best, they could only read by learning to recognize common words by sight. But researchers are finding that students with IDD, like their peers without disabilities, can benefit from a more complex approach, including phonics, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.

“I always get frustrated when I hear teachers say about students with intellectual disability, ‘They’ll never read higher than a second-grade level,’ ” said Chris Lemons, an associate professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE). “In every study I’ve ever done, there are kids who blow us out of the water and master everything we teach them. Truly, the sky is the limit with this population of students.”

Lemons and GSE lecturer Lakshmi Balasubramanian, both former special education teachers whose research focuses on instructional practices and interventions for students with disabilities, shared tips for teaching literacy to IDD learners at a recent professional learning seminar for K-12 educators organized by the GSE. The strategies can also be useful, they noted, for struggling readers who don’t have a disability but still need additional support.

GSE Associate Professor Chris Lemons

‘Science of reading’ for all

Historically, literacy instruction for students with IDD has focused on sight-word recognition, teaching students to identify words at a glance without breaking them down or sounding them out.

This approach, Lemons said, can help students function in the world but limits their ability to learn to read independently – a capacity linked to positive outcomes in school and beyond, including greater independence, employment, and quality of life.

For students across the board, research increasingly supports an instructional approach based on the “science of reading,” which focuses on five key skills: phonemic awareness (the ability to focus on and manipulate the individual sounds that make up words), phonics (the relationship between sounds and letters), fluency (the ability to read quickly and accurately), vocabulary (knowing what words mean and how to use them correctly), and comprehension (the ability to understand and interpret a written text).

Many teachers who otherwise subscribe to the science of reading don’t believe IDD students can learn these skills, Lemons said, or they’re not sure how to adjust their lessons for students who require more intense and tailored support. He co-authored a guide to help educators integrate components of the science of reading into instruction for students with IDD.

For starters, he advises keeping big-picture goals for the student in mind, not just for the year ahead but even for post-secondary life and education. At the same time, educators should set measurable short-term goals for targeted skills, based on a clear picture of the student’s present level of functioning.

Research indicates that the most effective and efficient way for students to learn these skills is through explicit, systematic instruction, Lemons said, and students with IDD are no exception. “Explicit instruction is, basically, not letting students fail,” said Lemons. “It's giving them a clear understanding of what you want them to learn, and providing a lot of guided practice and immediate corrective feedback.”

He recommends an “I do, we do, you do” approach, sometimes referred to as the gradual release of responsibility, where a teacher first demonstrates a task (“I do”), then guides a student through it with prompts and clues (“we do”) before having the student complete the task (“you do”) on their own.

GSE Lecturer Lakshmi Balasubramanian

Learning to adapt

Another step-by-step approach, known as the ADAPT framework, can help teachers tailor general education lessons to address specific learning and behavior needs. The model, detailed in the book Teaching in Inclusive Classrooms, uses the acronym ADAPT to represent each step of the process.

First, ask: What are you requiring the student to do? Then determine: What skills does the student need to complete the task you’ve just identified? Next, analyze the student’s particular strengths and struggles, to identify whether the student has the skills to complete the task or needs an adaptation. Based on that information, propose one or more adaptations in the material, activity, delivery, or content. Can you take advantage of an AI tool to adjust the reading level of material you’re asking the student to use? Would videos or other visuals help to build background knowledge? Can an individually based activity be done in small groups instead?

Finally, test to determine whether the adjustment helped the student carry out the task. “It doesn’t have to be anything fancy,” said Lemons. “You just want to see if the student benefited from the adaptation. If not, you can try the process again with different adaptations.”

Lemons emphasized the importance of increasing students’ access to general-ed curriculum content through any means, even if they’re not able to read a text independently. “We want kids to still engage with the same grade-level content as their peers,” he said. “Just because they’re still working on foundational reading skills, you don’t want them to lose access to content. It’s a balancing act.”

Keeping reading fun

Lemons suggests involving family members for added support, along with service providers such as speech pathologists. “But we caution parents from thinking they need to provide intensive, direct instruction at home,” he said. “We want to keep reading fun. I’ve had a handful of gung-ho parents in some of my studies who think, ‘If we do the reading activities six times a week, my kid will become a better reader.’ And in many of these situations, the student learns to dislike the activity.”

Teachers can also seek out low- or no-cost professional development opportunities, especially through local universities, Lemons said, where they might be able to participate in research studies or audit courses on reading development and instruction. Forming a professional learning community at a school or district is another strategy, where teachers with similar interests dedicate time on a regular basis to come together and discuss books, articles, videos, or course modules to improve their practice.

Most important, said Lemons, is for educators to understand that students with IDD are fully capable of becoming independent readers.

“For this population of learners,” he said, “we can increase their reading skills beyond what we might ever imagine.”

Research Stories

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Christopher J. Lemons

New study explores what makes digital learning products more – or less – effective

Carrie Spector — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 23:37:12 +0000

New study explores what makes digital learning products more – or less – effective

Carrie Spector Sun, 08/04/2024 - 16:37

A new study finds that the effectiveness of edtech products for early literacy varies considerably, depending on particular features of the interventions and the skills they target. (Photo: Shutterstock)

K-12 | Language and Literacy | Technology

Research led by �� Professor Rebecca Silverman analyzes studies on edtech interventions for early reading skills.

August 5, 2024

By Carrie Spector

Educational technology has become a fixture in the U.S. classroom, but scholars continue to debate its effectiveness – some even arguing that the products might deter learning by taking students’ time and attention away from more powerful supports.

What does research show about the effectiveness of edtech? Does the impact vary when it comes to teaching certain skills and student populations? How can schools determine which products are most useful for their own setting and purposes?

A new ��-led study sheds light on the value of edtech interventions, with a focus on products aimed at helping elementary school students develop early reading skills. In a meta-analysis of studies conducted over the past two decades, the researchers found that the effectiveness of tech products varied considerably, depending on particular features of the interventions and the skills they targeted.

“When we talk about digital learning products, they’re really not all the same – there’s a wide range,” said Rebecca Silverman, the Judy Koch Professor of Education at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), a faculty affiliate of the �� Accelerator for Learning, and the study’s lead author. “There isn’t a single answer to whether digital technologies support literacy. The question is much more complex: Which products, with which characteristics, under which conditions?”

The paper, published July 31 in the peer-reviewed journal Review of Educational Research, was co-authored by Elena Darling-Hammond, a doctoral student at the GSE; Kristin Keane, a postdoctoral scholar at the GSE; and Saurabh Khanna, PhD ’23, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam.

�� GSE Professor Rebecca Silverman

Accounting for variability

For the meta-analysis, the researchers drew on 119 studies published between 2010 and 2023 to examine the use of various digital interventions in kindergarten through fifth grade, including computer programs, e-books, online games, and videos.

The study is unique, they said, in its focus on edtech at the elementary school level and its review of interventions across four skills: decoding (the ability to read words quickly and accurately), language comprehension (understanding the meaning of words), reading comprehension (processing the meaning of a passage), and writing proficiency (the ability to convey ideas in writing).

Their analysis found positive effects on elementary school students’ reading skills overall, indicating that generally, investing in educational technology to support literacy is warranted. But when the researchers isolated particular learning outcomes to measure effectiveness, they found wide variability, suggesting that the effectiveness of a particular edtech product can depend on different factors, including features of the tool and characteristics of the users.

The authors observed that most studies – and the majority of products in the marketplace – focused on basic decoding, where students use phonetic skills to understand the relationship between written letters and their sounds. Relatively few studies considered language and reading comprehension, and only a handful looked at writing proficiency.

“Decoding is a fairly constrained construct involving a relatively circumscribed set of skills,” Silverman said. “There are only so many letters and sounds and letter-sound combinations that kids need to learn, so it’s generally easier to teach and see change over time.”

Language comprehension is a more complex construct, she said, involving a vast number of concepts, word meanings, and sentence constructions and the ability to make connections and build knowledge. “Its complexity makes it harder to teach and see progress. But it’s a crucial skill to be able to access texts and content, so we need more tools and research focused on that piece.”

Product features that appeared to account for some of the variability in effectiveness included the type of technology, the duration of the intervention, and the instructional approach (that is, whether it emphasized repetition and facts, strategies to organize and process information, or open-ended tasks).

The analysis found, for example, that certain personalization, gamification, and interactive feedback features, like pop-up questions and clickable definitions, were not effective for supporting more complex skills like reading comprehension.

Where student characteristics were concerned, socioeconomic status surfaced as one factor moderating effectiveness: With decoding as an outcome, for example, studies with a substantial percentage of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds tended to have larger effects compared with other studies, which Silverman said could be due to the programs they used being more geared toward their needs.

The researchers suspected that disability and language status would also emerge as a factor in the variability they uncovered, but few studies disaggregated findings based on these backgrounds.

“A program might not benefit some kids as much as others, and if we don’t track that in a systematic way, we’re not going to know,” Silverman said. “Right now, it’s not being systematically captured in the research, and that’s a problem.”

The researchers also noted that few studies addressed edtech’s impact on students’ motivation or engagement, and few included follow-up over time, to assess whether the effects lasted months or even years after the intervention.

Considerations for school leaders

The findings point to several directions for educators and policymakers, the researchers concluded. For one thing, Silverman said, districts contemplating a particular product should carefully consider whether it’s appropriate for their population of students, and whether the content and approach aligns with the curriculum and classroom teaching.

She advised that, rather than taking marketing claims at face value, districts conduct a critical analysis of any program before deciding whether to adopt it for their schools. “Is it following the principles of effective practice for the skills you’re targeting with that program?” she said. “What studies have been done on it? How strong is the company’s own research? Has anybody done any independent research?”

Districts can also generate their own data, for example, by running a pilot program in which some schools or classrooms implement an edtech intervention, comparing their outcomes against the schools that don’t. “You may not be able to isolate [the effects of the program] completely,” Silverman said, “but an analysis can suggest whether this product is helpful.”

If a product doesn't appear to produce positive effects, districts can partner with researchers to try to figure out why — or they can move on to trying other tools and evaluate those, she said. “We don’t want kids to keep using products that aren’t helpful.”

Research Stories

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Rebecca Silverman

‘Short bursts’ of tutoring improves young readers’ skills in only minutes a day, �� study finds

Carrie Spector — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 20:52:26 +0000

‘Short bursts’ of tutoring improves young readers’ skills in only minutes a day, �� study finds

Carrie Spector Wed, 02/28/2024 - 12:52

A study by �� researchers found that kindergarteners and first graders who participated in a low-cost tutoring program showed greater reading fluency than those who did not receive the tutoring. (Photo: Jason Dioy)

K-12 | Language and Literacy | Teaching

Research by the National Student Support Accelerator shows the potential of a cost-effective tutoring model that can meet students’ varying needs.

February 29, 2024

By Julie Brosnan

Imagine a novel approach to in-school tutoring that hardly interrupts class instruction at all, because tutoring sessions take at most 10 minutes a day. And imagine that it works.

A study by �� researchers finds that “short bursts” of tutoring during the school day result in significant improvements in young students’ literacy skills, affirming the potential of a relatively low-cost and sustainable approach to helping children learn to read.

The study, conducted by researchers at the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) at �� University, evaluated the impact of an early literacy tutoring program for students in kindergarten and first grade. Students who participated in the program achieved greater reading fluency and were less likely to be classified as at-risk on a district literacy test than students who did not receive the tutoring, the researchers found.

Previous research has shown that high-impact tutoring – a model characterized by intensive, relationship-based, individualized instruction – is most effective when implemented during the school day several times per week with a consistent tutor and aligned with what a student is learning in class, said study co-author Susanna Loeb, a professor at �� Graduate School of Education and the founder and executive director of NSSA.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 39 percent of public schools from elementary to high school now offer some form of high-impact tutoring. Evidence supports the effectiveness of high-impact tutoring over other academic interventions, such as technology support or even smaller class-size, Loeb said.

This latest research from NSSA adds to the body of evidence, with an emphasis on a “short burst” model involving tutoring sessions that last only five to seven minutes, for kindergarteners and first graders. The findings were released in a recent research brief published by NSSA.

“We know that one-on-one, personalized tutoring produces the most significant improvements in reading, but many programs like that can be costly and hard to scale,” said Loeb. “This research provides promising evidence that a low-cost program – one that’s easily incorporated into the school day – can help advance reading skills in even the youngest students.”

Individualized instruction for students in need

NSSA, a program of the Systems Change for Advancing Learning and Equity (SCALE) initiative at the �� Accelerator for Learning, works to improve access to high-impact tutoring for students in need. NSSA conducts research on high-impact tutoring and provides resources to help schools and tutoring organizations implement high-quality programs at scale.

For this study, NSSA evaluated the impact of a tutoring program implemented in a large Southeastern U.S. school district by Chapter One, a global nonprofit. Through the program, part-time tutors are embedded into classrooms to provide the frequent "short bursts" of instruction.

Tutors meet one-on-one in the back of the classroom over the course of a school year during opportune moments. The short sessions minimize interruptions in the school day and take young students’ typically short attention spans into account.

Children making adequate progress might only see their tutor a couple times a week, while those who are far behind receive daily sessions. All of the students spend an additional 15 to 20 minutes several days a week practicing with learning software on individual tablet computers provided by the program. The approach was designed to ensure that students receive individualized instruction when they need the support, and to foster strong relationships between students and their consistent tutors.

During the 2021-22 school year, more than 800 kindergarten students were randomly assigned to one of two groups for the study, with about half receiving supplementary tutoring with the Chapter One program. The study continued during the 2022-23 school year, while the children attended first grade. There are two years remaining in the study as it follows the students to the end of third grade.

By the tutoring program’s second year of implementation, students in the test group showed a meaningful increase in oral reading fluency, and a reduced likelihood of being classified as at-risk on the district literacy exam (45 percent of students in the test group were classified as at-risk, compared with 54 percent in the control group). The findings build on promising results seen in the study's first year, which found that students who participated in the program were more than twice as likely to reach the target reading stage by the end of kindergarten as students in the control group.

Overcoming common barriers

The findings indicate that high-impact literacy tutoring can be implemented in a cost-effective and sustainable way, Loeb said.

The Chapter One program currently costs school districts $375 per student, which includes the cost of the tutors, tablets, and indirect costs of implementing the program. “Even in larger implementations that might involve thousands of students, the cost would be substantially lower per student than the vast majority of other types of tutoring programs,” said Loeb.

Earlier research by NSSA has shown that educators and school leaders cite scheduling and logistics as common barriers to implementing high-impact tutoring, and the researchers pointed to the advantage of the short-burst model as a scalable program that school districts could adopt and easily infuse into their school day.

In an article for The 74, a nonprofit news organization covering the American education system, literacy coach Ingrid Rosales described the minimal interruption this form of tutoring presents. “It kind of runs itself,” said Rosales, who works at Orange Brook Elementary, a Title I school in Hollywood, Florida. “It doesn’t really interfere with our instruction.”

High-impact tutoring “could be a game-changer” in education, Loeb said, by offering an affordable and sustainable solution to improve early literacy. “As COVID-relief funding winds down, these findings present a compelling case for prioritizing tutoring interventions going forward.”

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At �� GSE event, former National Teacher of the Year Juliana Urtubey makes a case for a “joyous and just” education for all

Olivia Peterkin — Sat, 06 May 2023 00:04:38 +0000

At �� GSE event, former National Teacher of the Year Juliana Urtubey makes a case for a “joyous and just” education for all

Olivia Peterkin Fri, 05/05/2023 - 17:04

Juliana Urtubey gives a moving lecture centered on bettering learning environments for students at the Cubberley Lecture in Memorial Auditorium on Wednesday, May 3. (Photo: Sherry Tesler)

Education Policy | Language and Literacy | Teaching

Urtubey shares how a "joyous and just" education is one that both embraces and challenges those with learning differences.

May 5, 2023

By Olivia Peterkin

If you ask Juliana Urtubey — the 2021 National Teacher of the Year and a board-certified bilingual and special education teacher — what it means to create a “joyous and just” education for all, she’ll liken it to building a community garden.

The work requires many hands with different gifts, a dedication to time in the dirt and resources to help it grow. Luckily, Urtubey says that educators and policymakers aren’t far off.

“When people are telling you that the future of education is not hopeful, that we don’t have diverse teachers coming into the pipeline, that we don’t have people committed to making education better, I have to tell them that’s not the truth, because of the rooms and spaces I get to be in,” she said in a moving lecture at Memorial Auditorium on May 3, centered around bettering student learning environments.

During the 85th annual Cubberley Lecture, a series hosted by �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) that focuses on critical topics in education, Urtubey offered the audience of teachers, students, education leaders and others strategies for creating classrooms that respected and challenged those with learning differences and those who speak languages other than English at home. Her keynote, entitled “A Joyous and Just Education for All,” was followed by a panel moderated by GSE Associate Professor Jonathan Rosa that included �� alumnae Lauren Camarillo, a 2023 California Teacher of the Year, and Tara Kini, chief of staff and director of state policy at the Learning Policy Institute.

Click here to watch the video recording!

GSE Associate Professor Jonathan Rosa (far right) led a panel discussion that included Urtubey (far left), �� alumnae Lauren Camarillo (center left), a 2023 California Teacher of the Year, and Tara Kini (center right), chief of staff and director of state policy at the Learning Policy Institute.

Before the lecture, Urtubey met with students from the �� Teacher Education Program, of which Camarillo and Kini received degrees.

“I come with this fundamental belief that children with learning and thinking differences can be all the things, including multilingual,” said Urtubey, who immigrated to the U.S. from Colombia with her family as a young child.

Joyous and just

Broken down, Urtubey said that true joy comes from knowing one's intrinsic value and how it ties to others in the community; while justice in education comes from a system that shapes its policies around the voices and stories of students.

“A joyous and just education is one that embraces students and their families, allows students to learn as they are and is guided by student voices and needs,” Urtubey said.

During the panel discussion Rosa, who is also a faculty affiliate of the �� Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, asked Urtubey about the practical work of reframing education and seeing skills where others see problems.

“Sometimes the biggest work we can do is take a step back and listen to the people in our community,” Urtubey said. “I think that the reframes come from listening to these stories and addressing them.”

Camarillo, a high school teacher, added that inclusion is key in reframing education.

“I think when students know that you honor who they are, whether it’s their strengths or challenges, you’re promoting a sense of inclusion on a small level,” she said.

On the policy side, Kini said that inclusion means working to ensure that every child has a teacher like Urtubey or Camarillo leading their classrooms.

“We need to think about, what are the policies that enable competitive compensation for teachers so we can have and hold on to expert teachers in our schools,” Kini said.

Cultivating students

Like many educators, Urtubey has had to re-commit herself to the teaching profession in tough times.

“During Covid I went through a lot of reflection about the ability to sustain this work,” she said. “And in this time of reflection I often try to do a pros and cons list of whether I should stay in the classroom.”

Ultimately, she says it’s her students that always bring her back.

“All that comes to my mind are stories of when my students reminded me that the closer I am to them, the more hopeful I will be as a practitioner.”

Camarillo agreed that students have remained the driving force behind her commitment to education.

“Being close to students, seeing their passion and the way that they uplift their peers is what inspires and sustains me,” she said.

Patience for the harvest

“Hope is a commitment,” Urtubey said.

One she first saw in her mother as she pooled community knowledge in the search for an excellent bilingual school for Urtubey and her sisters to attend when she was a child.

“I don’t believe that every family should have to go searching far and wide for a joyous and just education,” Urtubey said. “I believe we have the resources in this country and the people power to make it happen at each and every single school.”

One of her first successes in creating a safe space for students was a school garden she started at her Las Vegas elementary school, because she felt a division between staff and the community. The garden helped to remedy that.

“This informed me and the teacher I would become,” she said. “We never know what’s growing underground and we never know the impact that we have when we connect to other people.”

Bringing her mother to the garden for the first time and seeing students teach her how to rake, water and care for plants, brought her full circle.

“I guess what I didn’t realize is that I built the garden for her,” she said. “For her to stand in the garden and see my students full of joy and full of justice.”

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�� lecturer explores the rise of book bans, from Nazi book burnings to school board races

Carrie Spector — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 17:33:06 +0000

�� lecturer explores the rise of book bans, from Nazi book burnings to school board races

Carrie Spector Tue, 07/05/2022 - 10:33

Photo: Redd / Unsplash

Curriculum and Instruction | Language and Literacy

Jennifer Wolf, a senior lecturer of education, discusses a renewed push to ban books from U.S. schools and libraries.

July 6, 2022

By Carrie Spector

Efforts to ban books in the United States have surged at a rate the American Library Association calls “unprecedented,” with attempts currently at their highest level since the organization began tracking them 20 years ago.

A few high-profile examples: In January, a Tennessee county school board voted unanimously to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Maus from eighth grade lessons on the Holocaust. Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin made book banning a focal point of his successful 2021 campaign, targeting Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. And Texas legislators recently passed HB 3979, which bans the teaching of any materials that could result in “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.”

"We talk a lot about teachers’ responsibility to create a safe space in the classroom. That’s different from a comfortable space," says Jennifer Wolf, a senior lecturer at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) and director of undergraduate programs at the GSE. (Photo: Sofiia Kukhar)

Jennifer Wolf, a senior lecturer at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), teaches courses in young adult literature, including a class on the genre for undergraduates interested in teaching or working with adolescents. She is also the director of undergraduate programs at the GSE (UP@GSE), which offers courses, degrees, and research and service opportunities in education for �� undergrads. UP‎@‎GSE hosted a teach-in on book banning this spring, one in an occasional series that brings students together to explore current topics in education.

Here, Wolf discusses how approaches to book banning have changed over the years, teachers’ responsibility to students when challenges arise, and the now-prominent role parents play in pushing for books to be removed from schools.

How do the current book challenges compare with efforts from the past?

I think for many of us, the history of book banning brings to mind some of the images of Nazi book burnings of the 1930s, which was fictionalized a couple of decades later in Fahrenheit 451. In fictionalizing the practice I think we’ve allowed ourselves to think it’s something that couldn’t happen again, and yet folks who are really committed to book banning right now are using a lot of the same strategies that we saw in the past.

One thing that’s interesting and different is that, when the Nazis instigated book banning as part of their political agenda, they included young people in the role of finding and burning books. Students were given the job of finding books that fit the criteria set by the Nazis – there weren’t lists of titles like there are now, there were qualities or types of books. And students were in charge of finding those books and leading the whole ritual of burning the books in public. I’m sure it was a pretty enticing handover, to invite young people to lead this very dramatic ritual.

What about the nature of the books being targeted?

The types of books that the Nazis wanted removed and burned were largely political, with ideologies opposed to Nazism, including books on race and sexuality. One of the first Nazi book burnings took place at a clinic that researched and performed gender confirmation surgery and housed a library of books on the subject.

Today we find that book bans supposedly targeting a particular issue often go well beyond it. After the Texas House passed HB 3979, the so-called “critical race theory” law, a state legislator sent a 16-page spreadsheet of 850 titles to the Texas Education Agency, asking if any of the schools had the books listed in order to verify compliance with the bill. But when we look closely at the titles on that list, the majority of the books on the list are about LGBTQ+ identity and sex education. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to the actual titles that are singled out, to see what the bans are really about.

This contemporary push seems to be a response to people coming forward and asking for more diverse representation in the books that are available in schools, either in the curriculum or in school libraries. I think it’s a reaction to more people asking for their voice to be heard in the discussion about how we represent identity and teach it to our kids.

It seems like there’s also a new dimension in the way teachers and librarians are being aggressively targeted, treated as criminals for including or allowing these books.

My understanding is that the legal avenues that legislators and school boards have tried to put in place have no teeth. But they have a great deal of power in diminishing morale and increasing fear. At a time when we're facing an acute teacher shortage, why in the world would we want to threaten and frighten teachers and librarians out of their profession?

School librarians are an interesting player in all this. There are books that are part of the curriculum, and then there are books that are in school libraries. It's one thing to say, ‘I don't want this book taught in the classroom.’ It's another to say, ‘I don't want any student to be able to have access to this book’ – a book that could answer their questions, affirm their identity, save them.

Parents also seem much more engaged in these efforts.

Absolutely. For years in my teaching, my message has been: Get involved in the education democracy. Do you know who’s on your local school board? Do you know who’s running? Do you understand your responsibility to participate? And now we have whole swaths of people showing up to school board meetings, running for the school board, saying, ‘I don’t want my child reading this book. It’s not the way I want to raise my child. I don’t want my child to feel uncomfortable.’ This puts parents at odds with the teaching profession, after we’ve prepared and credentialed and put our trust in teachers to do what’s best for kids to learn.

Do teachers have a responsibility to act on parents’ concerns?

We talk a lot in teacher preparation studies about teachers’ responsibility to create a safe space in the classroom. That’s different from a comfortable space. Learning involves growth, and growth involves stretching and changing. That’s not always comfortable, but it’s productive and necessary. I’ve read many of these books that are being challenged, and I can attest – they do push us outside of our comfort area.

Part of the way we use literature in our lives is to grow and stretch us – to teach us how to read life, how to understand character, how to decide who’s trustworthy, how to anticipate what will happen next and learn from what’s already happened. The things we do inside the plot of strong literature are things we want our young people to do outside the pages of the book. And there’s going to be some discomfort.

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New online tool developed by �� researchers helps schools spot struggling readers in a fraction of the usual time

Carrie Spector — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 19:58:06 +0000

New online tool developed by �� researchers helps schools spot struggling readers in a fraction of the usual time

Carrie Spector Wed, 06/08/2022 - 12:58

A new online tool allows school districts to assess their entire student population for struggling readers in the time it currently takes to run a standard assessment on a single student. (Photo: Kurt Hickman)

Brain and Learning Sciences | K-12 | Language and Literacy

�� researchers are working with local schools to transform a pandemic workaround into a tool for screening students with reading difficulties.

June 9, 2022

By Carrie Spector

Identifying struggling young readers can be a time-consuming and costly task for schools, requiring a teacher or reading specialist to sit with students one-on-one to gauge their proficiency as the child reads aloud.

A new online tool developed at a �� lab lifts that burden without compromising any of the reliability of one-to-one assessments while advancing research into why some kids have trouble with reading in the first place.

The Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR), developed at the Brain Development & Education Lab at ��, introduces a way for school districts to assess their entire student population for struggling readers in the time it currently takes to run a standard assessment on a single student.

In addition to giving teachers useful insight into the challenges a particular student faces, the collective data generated by the assessment is helping to further the lab’s research into factors linked to learning differences in young readers.

“With the ROAR, schools and clinics can assess and monitor kids’ progress at a scale that just wasn’t possible before,” said Jason Yeatman, an assistant professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) and the School of Medicine, who directs the Brain Development & Education Lab. “And because the tool is tied to research that’s ongoing, it gives us data that can answer a lot of questions about the mechanisms of reading development – data that can help us understand why some kids struggle and others don’t.”

"The hope is that, as we begin to understand the barriers for some kids, we can develop targeted interventions."

Jason Yeatman

Assistant Professor, �� Graduate School of Education and the School of Medicine

A pandemic workaround takes off

The ROAR actually originated as a COVID-19 research workaround for the lab, where Yeatman and his team study the mechanisms in the brain that underlie learning.

One focus of the lab is to develop interventions for young children with dyslexia, research that relies on brain imaging studies to observe the effects an intervention has on the brain. That work includes developing targeted measures to evaluate a child’s growth in specific reading skills.

“All of this requires working in close, one-on-one or small group settings with children,” said Yeatman. “When the pandemic hit, with all of its uncertainty, we realized that we needed to come up with some new innovations in order to continue pushing our research forward.”

The researchers thought an online assessment might function reasonably well in place of the standardized in-person version they had been using, and they developed a prototype of the ROAR. Subsequent validation studies showed a remarkably high-reliability rate: Scores generated by the ROAR correlated strongly with those from standardized in-person screenings, including the Woodcock-Johnson assessment of basic reading skills, widely considered the gold standard.

“The correlation was almost perfect, meaning these measures are tapping into a very similar construct,” said Yeatman. “Honestly, we didn’t expect it to work as well as it did.”

Meanwhile, Yeatman and his team had been working with local school officials around new California guidelines issued to help teachers identify and support students with dyslexia. That relationship – developed through the ��-Sequoia K-12 Research Collaborative, a partnership launched in 2018 to connect GSE researchers with San Mateo County school districts to explore challenges facing the districts – laid the groundwork for helping to pilot and refine the ROAR.

“We’d had a lot of conversations [with Yeatman] about how we could get more data, where we could find a good universal screener, how to go about implementing the guidelines – we learned a lot from him and his team,” said Marta Batlle, student services director at the Woodside School District, one of the districts in the collaborative. “When they asked if we wanted to partner to administer the ROAR, we were really interested in having more data, and we wanted to be part of the research process.”

Making a game of it

The ROAR, which runs on any web browser, launched with an assessment that measures students’ ability to quickly recognize words, a foundational skill for reading fluency and comprehension. It’s designed to feel like a computer game, with cartoon-like characters walking students through the activity and encouraging them along the way. A mix of actual and made-up words flash on the screen; the student’s task is to determine whether each word is real or not.

“The kids love it,” Batlle said. “They’re engaged, and they want to do it.”

Students as young as first-graders can do the assessment on their own, in the classroom or at home.

The lab collaborated closely with school leaders to develop interactive score reports for the educators, providing statistics and visualizations from the district level down to individual classrooms and students.

“The reports provide immediate, actionable data back to reading specialists and teachers, right after students have taken the ROAR,” said Amy Burkhardt, director of research and partnerships at the Brain Development & Education Lab. (The scores are stripped of any identifying student data for ��’s use.)

“With the ROAR, we got a measure for every student in the classroom in about the same amount of time it takes us to administer our usual screener with one child,” said Ching-Pei Hu, assistant superintendent at the Belmont-Redwood Shores School District, another district in the ��-Sequoia K-12 Research Collaborative that worked with �� to pilot the ROAR. “It’s fast, it’s efficient, and it was reliable in giving us a baseline of who we need to dig into some more.”

Looking ahead

As they work with schools and clinics to refine the ROAR’s tool for assessing single-word recognition, Yeatman and his team are developing others for more complex reading skills, including phonological awareness (the ability to recognize and manipulate sounds) and the ability to silently read and understand full sentences quickly and accurately.

Through pilot funding from ��’s Office of Community Engagement, the team recently expanded their research collaborations to include KIPP Schools of Northern California. The lab is also collaborating with the Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics clinic in the �� School of Medicine to explore the use of these assessments as a screener for children with learning differences who enter �� Hospitals and Clinics.

Beyond providing a practical tool for clinicians and educators and a better understanding of learning differences, the researchers hope the data generated by the ROAR will ultimately help in developing tailored approaches to help struggling readers.

“You can see kids from the same background – the same families, even – entering kindergarten, where they learn how letters can be combined to make words and represent human language,” said Yeatman. “Some kids dive right into that and they’re suddenly reading, but others struggle deeply for many years to learn this mapping, to make it automatic, to be able to use written language as a fluid form of communication. We’re trying to understand the difference – and the hope is that as we begin to understand the barriers for some kids, we can develop targeted interventions.”

The Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR) is among the projects of the initiative on Learning Differences and the Future of Special Education at �� Graduate School of Education. The �� Transforming Learning Accelerator, which creates and delivers new learning solutions, helped facilitate the use of the ROAR with schools and other partners.

Early funding for the tool was provided through a Neuroscience:Translate award from the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at ��.

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New professor at �� GSE joins team of researchers examining race and language in education

Brooke Donald Gorlick — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 23:41:33 +0000

New professor at �� GSE joins team of researchers examining race and language in education

Brooke Donald … Fri, 03/19/2021 - 16:41

Announcements | Language and Literacy | Race and Equity

Linguist Anne H. Charity Hudley will start in July 2021.

March 19, 2021

�� Graduate School of Education (GSE) will welcome Anne H. Charity Hudley as a new member of its faculty in July 2021. Charity Hudley's appointment is in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at the School of Humanities and Sciences.

Charity Hudley’s appointment reflects a deliberate focus at the GSE to address educational inequities through research, teaching, and practice, and deliver solutions that improve learning for all. Charity Hudley will join a team of researchers in the GSE program on Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE), which examines the major cultural, societal, and historical factors that influence educational attainment.

“Anne presents a multicultural, multidisciplinary approach to linguistic and racial justice to address educational challenges,” said GSE Dean Dan Schwartz. “We’re thrilled she’s bringing her expertise and enthusiasm to the �� community,”

A linguist, Charity Hudley’s teaching and research focuses on language, literacy, and culture of African Americans. She’s a prolific writer, having authored multiple books and scholarly articles. Her latest book is The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and Beyond College.

"Anne is one of the world’s leading scholars and thinkers about the role of African-American language in school and culture," said Bryan Brown, associate professor and director of the RILE program at GSE. "She will bring our RILE program a vital lens on language that helps us consider how language matters and how it changes in our modern society.”

Charity Hudley will also be affiliated with the African and African American Studies program and Linguistics Department at ��.

“We look forward to welcoming Anne as our senior colleague. Her brilliant scholarship on African-American Vernacular English and on interdisciplinary formations in higher education will transform work in the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, African and African American Studies, the GSE, and the university as a whole,” said Jennifer Brody, a professor of theater and performance studies.

Charity Hudley is currently the North Hall Endowed Chair in the Linguistics of African America at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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������������ education scholars launch new academic journal focused on Black life, language, and culture

How language bias persists in scientific publishing despite AI tools

������������ team builds tool to keep young readers from falling through the cracks

Learners with disabilities benefit from more complex reading instruction, ������������ researchers say

New study explores what makes digital learning products more – or less – effective

Accounting for variability

Considerations for school leaders

‘Short bursts’ of tutoring improves young readers’ skills in only minutes a day, ������������ study finds

Individualized instruction for students in need

Overcoming common barriers

At ������������ GSE event, former National Teacher of the Year Juliana Urtubey makes a case for a “joyous and just” education for all

Click here to watch the video recording!

������������ lecturer explores the rise of book bans, from Nazi book burnings to school board races

New online tool developed by ������������ researchers helps schools spot struggling readers in a fraction of the usual time

New professor at ������������ GSE joins team of researchers examining race and language in education

�� education scholars launch new academic journal focused on Black life, language, and culture

�� team builds tool to keep young readers from falling through the cracks

Learners with disabilities benefit from more complex reading instruction, �� researchers say

‘Short bursts’ of tutoring improves young readers’ skills in only minutes a day, �� study finds

At �� GSE event, former National Teacher of the Year Juliana Urtubey makes a case for a “joyous and just” education for all

�� lecturer explores the rise of book bans, from Nazi book burnings to school board races

New online tool developed by �� researchers helps schools spot struggling readers in a fraction of the usual time

New professor at �� GSE joins team of researchers examining race and language in education