Kathy Rastle | Learning to Read | Talks at Google

Kathy Rastle, a leading expert on skilled reading and learning to read, to discuss how her lab’s research has had a major influence on how children around the world are taught to read. Learning to read is the most important milestone of a child’s education. Yet, reading is not a universal part of human experience. Writing is a recent cultural invention and reading is a learned skill whose mastery requires years of instruction, dedication, and practice. Kathy will walk us through what psychological science has discovered about this fascinating process, and share her reflections on how we can use this knowledge to improve literacy for children around the world. Kathy’s research is focused on reading acquisition, skilled reading, and the relationship between reading and spoken language. She has a particular interest in characterizing the information that is present in written language(s), and in understanding how this information is learned through instruction and text experience. Recently, she conducted a number of artificial language learning experiments investigating how acquired knowledge is influenced by properties of languages and writing systems, the quality of prior knowledge, and the nature of instruction. Her work capitalizes on a variety of behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational modeling approaches. In 2020, Kathy and her collaborators were awarded the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) Celebrating Impact Prize, for their work which focuses on bringing the science of reading to how children are taught to read in classrooms around the world. Kathy completed her PhD in psychology at Macquarie University (Sydney) in 1997. She then undertook postdoctoral appointments at the University of Cambridge and at Macquarie University, before accepting an academic position at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2002, where she is now professor and Head of Department. Kathy is the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Memory and Language and President of the Experimental Psychology Society. Previously, she served on the ESRC Strategic Advisory Board, the ESRC Research Committee, and was Chair of the ESRC grants assessment panels for Psychology, Linguistics, and Education (2010-2014) and for Psychology, Economics, & Management (2014-2015). She served on the Medical & Health Sciences panel for the Excellence in Research for Australia in 2015. Moderated by Yang Gao. #talksatgoogle #reading #childeducation