Global scholar of reading and the brain works to improve teachers’ ability to serve readers at all levels.
Maryanne Wolf is at the forefront of a global awakening around the effects of the digital world on reading and the brain. Over the last two and a half years, the director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA has given more than 200 talks, interviews, and podcasts on the “sometimes advantageous and sometimes very disruptive impact of digital devices on children’s development, of language, reading and writing.”
“More than half of the talks I give on reading and the science of reading elicit additional questions— either by the organizer or the audience– on the digital culture [and the] chasm between should we digitize everything or should we have print for everything, or how we can make a balance,” says Wolf, a professor-in-residence at the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies and a co-founding member of the UC|CSU Collaborative for Neuroscience, Diversity, and Learning.
The author of more than 170 scientific articles, Professor Wolf designed the RAVE-O reading intervention for children with dyslexia, and with Martha Denckla, co-authored the RAN/RAS naming speed tests, a major predictor of dyslexia across all languages. Wolf is currently working with members of the Dyslexia Center in the UCSF School of Medicine and the UC/CSU Collaborative on issues related to dyslexia and literacy. She is a research advisor to the Canadian Children’s Literacy Foundation and to numerous boards, including the Stanford Center for the Study of Behavioral Science.
Professor Wolf’s awards include the Fulbright Fellowship, the Chapman University Presidential Fellow, the Norman Geschwind and Samuel Orton Awards (the highest honors from the International Dyslexia Association), the Distinguished Teacher of the Year awards from the state and national American Psychological Associations, the Eminent Researcher of the Year Award for Learning Disabilities (Australia), and both the Alice Ansara and the Windward Researcher of the Year award for her research on dyslexia. She received the Christopher Columbus award for Intellectual Innovation for her work as co-founder of Curious Learning, a global literacy initiative with deployments in Africa, India, Australia, and the rural United States; and the Einstein Award from The Dyslexia Foundation for her work in neuroscience on dyslexia. Professor Wolf is one of the few women elected to the 80-member Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Professor Wolf discusses here the importance of deep reading, a key vehicle for attaining empathy and critical thinking, one of the best tools for the young to discern the truth from misinformation and disinformation.
What are some of the concerns you have found in the U.S. and across the world in ongoing debates in education over print vs. digital?
Maryanne Wolf: The National Assessment of Educational Progress – or NAEP – scores are our government’s grade card for literacy and math. What we found out this year is that for 4th graders, this is the single worst set of scores in over 20 years. For 8th graders, it’s the worst in 30 years.
That brings us to the state. [California] is very worried because not even a third of our kids in 8th grade are reaching the level which would be called expert, proficient, or fluent comprehending reading. That is what we want everybody to have. More worrisome still, our kids of color are not even a third of that percentage – they are closer to 15%.
The world likes to blame: “Oh, we lost time during COVID.” It is absolutely true. But the way it goes too often in the blame game: “It’s the methods of the teachers,” so we’re blaming the teacher instead of looking at all the factors that we need to address. The emphasis on the literacy scores by states now has had me kind of Zoom running… to talk about three major factors on literacy: COVID, the methods of teaching, and the digital world. The reality is that it’s all three of those factors. This is where what is called the science of reading has been my major contribution.
We’re using neuroscience data and the science [which is] bigger than just phonics or phoneme awareness, which is the typical emphasis. My job is to show how much broader the science is, so that all teachers —some of whom never want to hear the word science; some of whom never want to hear balanced literacy, or whole language —will see an onramp for themselves. I want them all to understand that it’s not just about teaching phonics to the kids, but about emphasizing all the language processes and always connecting these processes to stories, to literature, to engagement, to critical thinking, all those things. The true science of reading includes all of that.
There are major podcasts in this country that others and I have done, almost as many as you can imagine. This year, I began on January 6, with one called Classroom Dynamics. It went to about 90 cities and 14 countries around the world. It’s about teaching people this expanded view of the science of reading, and helping them have examples of real interventions, one that my colleagues and I have done under NIH and NICHD, and under the Office of Special Education. For example, we emphasize multi-component interventions like our own RAVE-O Program that is based on the reading brain and propels deep reading.
Along with my postdoctoral fellow, Sohyun Kim, I have an increasingly significant relationship to what is happening in Korea. They just reissued my book, “Proust and the Squid,” in Korean, this is the second edition for them. I have been in conversations with various people at the Korean Broadcasting System – they have flown [me in] and filmed me for a program on literacy. I have spoken to different stations [in Korea] on the fact that digitizing everything in the 3rd grade, I think, is the absolute incorrect way of teaching their youngest children.
They are unbelievable in their wonderful emphasis on education as seen in their ranking on the world’s PISA scores, but they also sometimes go with educational trends. I’m trying to work with them in two ways. I am saying that the evidence in some countries like Sweden and Norway – where I testify for their governments – [says] this is not the best way for academic performance of the young. I also want to help them look carefully at those children who are being neglected in the schools. They can both have the highest PISA scores and work with all children to meet their potential.
What are some supports to help teachers and schools to address diminishing literacy?
Wolf: We all were hurt by COVID, but we can’t do anything about that. What we can do is look at the methods of teaching that we do have control over and how our children use digital devices.
I work with my colleague, Sue Sears from CSU Northridge, and we have developed, as a result of the UC|CSU Collaborative for Neuroscience, Diversity, and Learning, an entire group of modules to teach teachers about dyslexia and literacy. Those pre-service teachers never had a course on dyslexia, and [they] never understood that if you understand dyslexia … you understand any struggling reader, including our multi-lingual learners, regardless of the area of weakness.
These principles about learning about how to teach children with dyslexia [include] not only our insights for teaching based on the developing reading brain, but also insights into the real lives of our children: Who are they? Are they multilingual? Are they English language learners? Do they have a background of poverty or abuse? What are the all the background things that you can bring to bear and teach teachers all these different aspects?
We are trying our hardest to help our young teachers who are in educational programs around the state to get these modules to complement their coursework. If they’re already [working] in LAUSD, we work on professional development to give these same principles. For example, I gave the keynote for all the principals and all the assistant principals in LAUSD, and what they call the writing cadre of L.A. teachers. Even further, we disseminate this information to the public, going as much as we possibly can to as many states and as many places in California that can influence the teaching practice through talks, through the standard methods [and] state committees. Sue and I are on the Teacher Performance Expectations committee, writing what we hope will expand the teacher performance knowledge so that when they get these expectations in a given program, they will have to know about these things that are the expanded version of the science of reading.
Laura Reinhart and Rebecca Gottlieb are two major researchers within [the Collaborative] working on everything from attention to brain changes in adolescence. In addition, Laura works at the state level on teacher assessment. Together our Center and Collaborative have a tripod approach. We work on the development of knowledge, the dissemination of knowledge, and the changing of policy and mindset, particularly for teachers’ professional development, pre-service and in the field. And now, with all the worries people have about digital culture, we’re working on that as well.
How are you able to address the ever-expanding dependence upon technology and AI in teaching and learning?
Wolf: A typical teenager [spends] 40% of their time on digital devices– that’s the equivalent of three months of schooling. It’s time fraught with possible impediments to their development of deep reading, especially if [information] is not correct. We need to prepare our young for dealing with these issues in their early formation as readers. They need both their own store of background knowledge in order to evaluate information and a reading circuit that has learned to evaluate and check the “truth” of what they read. What they must also learn is to not to overrely on external information.
It’s in the literature as the Google effect, where if the reader assumes they can access the information, they are not learning [information] themselves. They know where to access it, but they don’t have it within themselves as the basis of evaluation. This translates into a less elaborated reading circuit in which critical thinking skills are not sufficiently developing because children are not expending the efforts that build the circuit. Basically, they accept [information] and in the process do not build the circuits necessary for either critical thinking or perspective taking or empathy.
If you think about the brain as a series of muscles, these young readers do not exercise the muscles that, through labor and effort over time, contribute to the growth of the circuit. Writing is a perfect example. If you farm it all out to Chat GPT, children and youth are not only vulnerable, but they are losing the potential for their own brains to become ever more elaborated, and thus more able to evaluate and to articulate their own best thoughts. Our society’s rapacious appetite for efficiency and effort-saving is ultimately anathema to the developing reading brain.
How has the digital world stunted the development of the reading brain and the ability to discern truth from misinformation?
Wolf: It’s a very tricky moment in the species … a critical moment for the species to get this right. I dare say, when I see what’s happening in our government, there is the pernicious assumption that you can just simply slash because you have an “algorithm for efficiency,” without giving attention to the effects on real lives.
Such an assumption is part of a larger problem in which technology can either serve or reduce our humanity. The important questions about new technologies aren’t being asked soon enough. Before we create, we aren’t looking enough at the effects of whatever the technological innovations are on the lives and development of the people who are affected.
It’s not that innovation is itself wrong. It is, however, not neutral. It has effects, and if you innovate without asking what it disrupts or diminishes, either in the young or in the adult, major errors can impede the species’ development over time. These questions are so necessary to address with our best thought from all our sectors of knowledge and technology. The advantages [of technology] can be extraordinary, but they should never impede the gradual, effortful building of those circuits that will ultimately lead our next generation to make wise, ethical, informed, empathic decisions. Darwin once described our evolution as moving “from so simple a beginning (to) endless forms most beautiful.” So also moves our ever evolving, deep reading brain.