Mika is a featured panelist at the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative Science of Reading Symposium!

More than six out of every ten fourth graders in the United States are not proficient readers, and changes in reading scores for fourth and eighth graders have increased by only 5 and 7 points since 1992  (source: National Assessment of Education Progress). MIT Integrated Learning Initiative (MITili) and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT are co-hosting a symposium on literacy and research science to start a meaningful conversation about the achievement gap in reading, and what we can learn from emerging research on how children learn to read.  By convening experts in education and neuroscience, we hope to determine new paths toward ensuring students are not only learning to read, but taught to read through more effective, rigorously researched methods. 

The symposium, to be led by MIT’s John Gabrieli and Sanjay Sarma, will be held in Cambridge, MA on June 4, 2019. Gabrieli, McGovern Institute Investigator and Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and colleagues have previously found structural differences that track with a specific predictor of dyslexia in young children. Their findings suggest that it may be possible to target at-risk children for early intervention rather than waiting until they are already struggling to read. To extend the practical applications of this research, Gabrieli and a team of researchers from MIT have formed a collaboration with Harvard to study early childhood literacy through the Reach Every Reader program.

By collaborating with and convening the top minds around neuroscience and the science of learning, MIT hopes to become an epicenter for education research which will lead to better educational outcomes. This will help bridge the gap between what science tells us about how students learn to read and the reality of literacy outcomes in the US.