Researcher–practitioner partnerships and in‐school laboratories facilitate translational research in reading

Abstract

Educational neuroscience approaches have helped to elucidate the brain basis of Reading Disability (RD) and of reading intervention response; however, there is often limited translation of this knowledge to the broader scientific and educational communities. Moreover, this work is traditionally lab-based, and thus the underlying theories and research questions are siloed from classroom practices. With growing awareness of the neurobiological origins of RD and increasing popularity of putative 'brain-based' approaches in clinics and classrooms, it is imperative that we create more direct and bidirectional communication between scientists and practitioners. Such direct collaborations can help dispel neuromyths, and lead to increased understanding of the promises and pitfalls of neuroscience approaches. Moreover, direct partnerships between researchers and practitioners can lead to greater ecological validity in study designs to improve upon the translational potential of findings. To this end, we have forged collaborative partnerships, and built cognitive neuroscience laboratories within independent reading disabilities schools. This approach affords frequent and ecologically valid neurobiological assessment as children's reading improves in response to intervention. It also permits the creation of dynamic models of leading and lagging relationships of students' learning, and identification of individual-level predictors of intervention response. The partnerships also provide in-depth knowledge of student characteristics and classroom practices, which, when combined with the data we acquire, may facilitate optimisation of instructional approaches. In this commentary, we discuss the creation of our partnerships, the scientific problem we are addressing (variable response to reading intervention), and the epistemological significance of researcher-practitioner bi-directional learning.

Mapping Neuroscience in the Field of Education through a Bibliometric Analysis

“…As presented in Figure 9 , the most mentioned keywords in the past 3 years are skill and integration. The related research around the keyword “skill” is the use of neuroscience technology to improve the educational process of children in order to improve writing [ 104 ], number recognition [ 105 ], accessible reading [ 106 ], and other skills. Related research around the keyword “integration” involves the design and reform of neuroscience courses for medical students.…”

Reflections on the past two decades of Mind, Brain, and Education

“…In a different domain, the need for more ecologically valid neuroimaging to measure how cognitive and neural processes that underlie learning unfold in naturalistic settings, has facilitated the optimization of portable neuroimaging methods across a diverse range of contexts. For example, portable electroencephalography has been used to study student engagement during live classroom instruction (Davidesco, Matuk, Bevilacqua, Poeppel, & Dikker, 2021;Landi et al, 2019), and functional near-infrared spectroscopy has been used to document neural signatures of reading development in children growing in environments with a high risk of illiteracy, rural Côte d'Ivoire (Jasińska & Guei, 2018). The implementation of portable neuroimaging in these settings posed methodological challenges, and the response to those challenges fostered innovation.…”

“…In-school EEG data collection is noisy, so the team has leveraged high-density EEG tools, which capture thousands of data points per second, combined with ML classifiers, to dissociate signal from noise. This allowed for a more precise characterization of individual differences in the neural substrates of reading as they unfold during instruction (Davidesco et al, 2021;Landi et al, 2019). To address the challenges of setting up a portable neuroimaging laboratory in low-resource contexts, researchers developed comprehensive protocols addressing problems such as high humidity and lack of Internet access (Jasińska & Guei, 2018).…”