Reading Disabilities, Reading Difficulties & School-Based Interventions that Work

The importance of early reading success to later educational achievement has now become common wisdom. Federal agencies, state governments, and individual schools and districts across the country have initiated programs to improve beginning reading instruction, including strategies to identify struggling readers as early as possible. But what comes next? Once a reading problem is detected, can it actually be averted? And, if so, with what “treatment”? In recent years, neuroscientists and reading researchers have pursued a preventive model of reading instruction that could also be wildly successful. What does this research tell us about what goes on in the brain of a struggling reader, before and after intervention? And how can schools and districts translate this research into classroom materials and strategies that really work to prevent reading failure?

Speakers

Sally Shaywitz, Professor of Pediatrics and Child Study, Yale University School of Medicine, and Co-director, Yale Center for the Study of Learning and Attention

Joseph Torgesen, Professor of Psychology, Florida State University, and Director, Center for the Study of Reading and Reading Disabilities

Antonia Cortese, Executive Vice President, American Federation of Teachers. (Moderator)