{"id":1250,"date":"2022-09-12T09:22:57","date_gmt":"2022-09-12T08:22:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/learning-difficulties\/?p=1250"},"modified":"2022-09-12T12:00:03","modified_gmt":"2022-09-12T11:00:03","slug":"kathy-rastle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/learning-difficulties\/2022\/09\/12\/kathy-rastle\/","title":{"rendered":"Kathy Rastle"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London.\u00a0 I\u2019m interested in the mechanisms that underlie reading and reading acquisition, and have a strong interest in translating this research to improve how children are taught to read.\u00a0 My research has won prizes from the BPS Cognitive Section and the Experimental Psychology Society, and I recently won the ESRC \u2018Celebrating Impact<\/em>\u2019 Prize for Outstanding International Impact.\u00a0 I\u2019m proud to serve as President of the Experimental Psychology Society and as Editor of Journal of Memory and Language.<\/p>\n

Can you give us an overview of your work?<\/h3>\n

I study the neurocognitive mechanisms that underpin skilled reading and learning to read.\u00a0 The main thrust of my work is to characterize the statistical regularities conveyed through written language(s), and to articulate how those regularities become represented as long-term knowledge through instruction, language experience, and neurobiological constraints on human learning.\u00a0 I\u2019m very interested in translating my research to improve global literacy and am keen to connect with policy and practice stakeholders in this space. \u00a0You can read about the impact of my research on www.rastlelab.com\/impact<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What are your most recent and exciting results?<\/h3>\n

My group recently published an article<\/a> in Psychological Science<\/em> in which we reveal the dramatic impact of explicit instruction on learning to read words printed in a new writing. There\u2019s been quite a lot of interest in research and in classroom practice on forms of learning that do not involve instruction.\u00a0 In primary education, many practitioners promote \u2018discovery learning\u2019 in which children\u2019s knowledge is built through their own experience (rather than teacher-led instruction).\u00a0 Likewise, psychological research has shown that humans pick up on different types of statistical regularities simply through experience in the environments that they inhabit.<\/p>\n

We studied the extent to which different learners were able to pick up on an underlying linguistic structure while learning to read new words printed in an unfamiliar alphabet.\u00a0 We were interested in whether participants would pick up on the way that symbols in the new alphabet map to sounds and meanings, in such a way that they could generalise understanding of these relationships to untrained words.\u00a0 One group was left to discover the relationships between spellings, sounds and meanings simply through their experience with the new language over a period of two weeks (18 hours of training).\u00a0 The other group had nearly the same experience with the new language, but the initial day of training was replaced by a short period of instruction in which we explained these relationships explicitly. \u00a0We tested participants not only on their knowledge of the trained words, but also on whether they could generalise knowledge of the underlying patterns to unfamiliar words (much as we\u2019re able to read aloud pseudowords like SLINT and VIB using our knowledge of the English alphabet).\u00a0 Our results revealed that discovery learning was ineffective and inefficient for almost all learners.\u00a0 While all participants learned the trained items to a high standard, very few of the discovery learners captured the underlying structure, and hence they were unable to generalise their experience to untrained words.\u00a0 In contract, results showed that just a short session of explicit instruction totally transformed learning outcomes, bringing all learners in that group to a high level of performance.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m excited about these findings because they have so much relevance to classroom practice, particularly in the area of reading acquisition, in which debate has raged for decades over the value of explicit phonics instruction. The results are also interesting from a fundamental research angle, as we know remarkably little about how instruction works, how it combines with experience to promote learning, and how this synergy between instruction and experience varies across individuals. \u00a0I\u2019m looking forward to digging into these themes further.<\/p>\n

What do you think are the main challenges in this research field?<\/h3>\n

Language, literacy and learning are incredibly complex domains in which there are many \u2018moving parts\u2019, and in which cause is often difficult to discern. Psychology offers the strong designs and methods that are needed to move forward, but we\u2019re in a resource constrained environment and will need to work together to develop the powerful studies that give insight into individual variation across developmental time.\u00a0 It is also vital that we work closely with external partners to build and realise tangible impacts from our research that benefit individuals, society, and the economy.<\/p>\n

www.tinyurl.com\/krastle\u00a0<\/a>|\u00a0<\/strong>@Kathy_Rastle<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am a Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London.\u00a0 I\u2019m interested in the mechanisms that underlie reading and reading acquisition, and have a strong interest in translating this research to improve how children are taught to read.\u00a0 My research has won prizes from the BPS Cognitive Section and the Experimental Psychology […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":126,"featured_media":1251,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"Sue Fletcher-Watson is Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, and Director of the Salvesen Mindroom Research Centre. She is interested in how children grow and learn, with a particular focus on development and neurodiversity. Her work draws on rigorous methods from psychology and applies these to questions with clinical, educational and societal impact. She strives\u00a0to achieve meaningful partnerships with community representatives and to support neurodivergent leadership in research. She is an advocate for open science and good citizenship in research, and serves as Co-Director of Research Ethics for the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine.\r\n

Can you give us an overview of your work?<\/h2>\r\nAt the Salvesen Mindroom Research Centre, we\u2019re fundamentally interested in doing research that can help us understand and tackle the inequalities experienced by neurodivergent people \u2013 in childhood and across the lifespan.\u00a0 What do I mean by inequalities?\u00a0 Well, neurodivergent people are more likely to experience mental health problems and they report lower quality of life. They can experience shorter life expectancies and difficulties accessing healthcare. They are more likely to be unemployed, homeless and in the prison population.\u00a0 In childhood, neurodivergent young people are more likely to be excluded from school, or to miss school, and they participate less in class.\u00a0 Across the lifespan neurodivergent people experience more bullying and victimisation, including sexual harassment and intimate partner violence. So neurodivergent people are drawing the short straw in a whole host of ways and we want to do work that understands why those inequalities arise and what can be done about them.\r\n

What are your most recent and exciting results?<\/h2>\r\nOne of our most exciting projects is called LEANS: Learning About Neurodiversity at School. This is a piece of work we\u2019ve been doing for just over two years.\u00a0 The early phase was focused on participatory design of materials to teach primary school aged children about the concept of neurodiversity.\u00a0 We want to shift young children\u2019s attitudes and beliefs \u2013 about themselves and about each other \u2013 to be more positive, inclusive and accepting. The materials were then evaluated in schools and now we have released them for free. We think this is a really important example of participatory work with a practical impact.\r\n

What do you think are the main challenges in this research field?<\/h2>\r\nI think adoption of a neurodiversity model across research and practice is a really important next step for the field.\u00a0 But that will certainly be easier said than done and it raises a lot of key questions.\u00a0 Things like, what is the role of diagnosis? How can we push back against pathologisation and stigma, while also ensuring people get the support they need?\u00a0 I\u2019m excited about these challenges though and I think if different groups with an investment in the field work together, we can get it right.\r\n

https:\/\/www.ed.ac.uk\/salvesen-research\u00a0<\/a>|\u00a0<\/strong>@suereviews<\/p>","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/learning-difficulties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/learning-difficulties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/learning-difficulties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/learning-difficulties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/126"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/learning-difficulties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/learning-difficulties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/learning-difficulties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/learning-difficulties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/learning-difficulties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/learning-difficulties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}