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Emily Wood (6:31)

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Dr. Samantha Amien (6:57)

To paraphrase RuPaul, completely out of context. Reading is what fundamental but actually countless studies have documented how the ability to read is crucial for physical and mental well being, socioeconomic mobility, and overall quality of Life. But in 2021, UNESCO reported more than 50% of children worldwide have literacy difficulties. So our team of word nerds wanted to understand how researchers study literacy so they can address those gaps. But with more than 7,000 languages worldwide, it is no easy task. So we invited along an expert to help us figure it out. Emily Wood is a speech language pathologist finishing her PhD at the University of Toronto. She's multilingual herself and looks into new approaches of testing literacy, with a focus on different testing for those who speak more than one language. Welcome to the show, Emily.

Emily Wood (7:52)

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Dr. Samantha Amien (7:54)

Now you've actually administered literacy assessments in your work as a speech language pathologist, and you also design literacy tests. So before we get into the cool ways that you're innovating those tests, like what's the standard way of testing? When does it happen?

Emily Wood (8:10)

So assessment is, you know, multifaceted, and there's lots of different ways or purposes for assessing. So when I was working in the school boards as a speech language pathologist. The main purpose or the main reason that I would do an assessment is typically because a student had already been struggling. They might have had difficulty in kindergarten, and that might have continued into grade one or grade two. And that might be when they would call me in and say, hey, you know, we have some concerns about this child's reading abilities. And so that assessment would be quite comprehensive. So I would be doing, you know, looking at their oral language skills, because language and literacy are intertwined. You know, reading and writing is just language in print, albeit a little bit more complex. The two things are linked. But I would also be doing, like, these big batteries of assessments looking at, like, key skills like phonological awareness and their letter sound knowledge, you know, their ability to, you know, read with comprehension and to write with expression. So it'd be a big, you know, multifaceted endeavor looking at many different things.

Dr. Samantha Amien (9:13)

When you say phonological awareness, is that like, recognizing phonemes, like sounds within a word? Because it's been a while since I've learned about this.

Emily Wood (9:22)

So way back when, we did what would be called phonics, paying attention to those sounds of the language and then learning how those sounds correspond or match to different letters. So, you know, the C cinsk or the K sysk, then we had, like, a little bit of a shift where we took a bit of a different direction, and we were using some strategies that were focused a little bit more on meaning, and we're focused more on strategies like making a smart guess or looking at the picture. And that was done in an effort to sort of, like, make learning to read more enjoyable, like, have more engaging texts and, you know, make it more about, like, the vocabulary and the content of the books that the children were reading. But it turns out that we actually do need to do that phonics approach. We actually do need to teach those letter sound combinations, even if sometimes it might seem boring. As an adult, learning those, like, basic correspondences at the beginning is really, really critical. So we've actually shifted back to incorporating, which is good, because I think we're going to see some. Some positive changes in terms of reading outcomes for students because of that.

Dr. Samantha Amien (10:27)

What are some of the challenges with the current methods that we're using to evaluate literacy in kids?

Emily Wood (10:32)

The research I do now focuses more on screening, and screening is much quicker. It's sort of administering a couple, like, key tests to children, and really, it's used to kind of make a decision about whether or not they might need Additional support or additional assessment. It's much less involved, much less comprehensive. But a lot of the tests that we have, and most of the tests that are being used are developed exclusively for kids who speak English. And so that can be a bit challenging because we have a lot of linguistic diversity here. I think you mentioned, like, 7,000 different languages around the world. We have like 250 at least languages in Canada, 400 languages at least in the United States spoken. Those English. Tests can be tricky for those kids who do speak other languages at home or who speak English and another language for a variety of different reasons. If I do, this sounds like giving, ooh, you speak English fluently, you're gonna know right away, oh, that's the word goose. But if I've grown up in a home where maybe I've only spoken, like, Tamil or Punjabi, which is one of the fastest growing languages in Canada, I might not be super familiar with the vocabulary term goose. Right. Like, it's common, but it's not that common. I might not have encountered a lot of geese or many goose in my life. And so that may be a little bit harder for me to latch onto just from like a vocabulary perspective.

Dr. Samantha Amien (11:58)

Oh, so you know what the sounds make, and you can string them together, but you don't know what the end result is because you don't know the word.

Emily Wood (12:04)

You might not know the word, or you just might have less familiarity with the word, which makes the task look a little bit harder for you. You maybe have to, you know, leverage your memory or your working memory or attention a little bit more. And so those things can. Can kind of compound, but it's more than the vocabulary. It can also even be just like the sounds of the language. So similarly, if I were having you read, let's say, the word the or the word thumb or the word there, or the word teeth, all those words have that th sound where you put your tongue between your teeth. But many languages around the world don't have that th sound. It's actually pretty restricted to a small set of languages, one of which is English. So even just like reading a word or sounding out a word that has that th sound in it, if your home language or your heritage language doesn't use those sounds, that might be a little bit trickier for you. Right. Just because I don't have familiarity with those phonemes or with those sounds. There's a whole bunch of other ways that language can affect it. And even culture can come into play when we think about how we do testing. But most of our Tests, like I said, are designed for that English monolingual focus. And we have so much linguistic and cultural diversity. I think it's important to keep those many different factors in mind when we're doing these evaluations because it can have an impact on performance.

Dr. Samantha Amien (13:25)

I first connected with you, seeing you present your research, designing a new type of test that was looking at dynamic versus static assessments for literacy. You've got to explain to us what that means and tell us a little bit about your study in designing this new way of testing for literacy to overcome the challenge for people who speak more than one language.

Emily Wood (13:47)

So in our sort of traditional or static approach, we can call it, generally what we're trying to measure is what the child already knows. And then we take that measure, and usually we compare it to some other group like their peers, the people in the classroom, or a larger normative sample, whatever it might be. The thing that's tricky about doing that with early reading abilities, particularly in kindergarten, when it's so important to do these reading skills screens, is that lots of kids don't have any acquired knowledge of literacy or pre reading skills in kindergarten because they're in kindergarten and they don't know how to read yet. That's what they're there to do. So if we evaluate what they already know, and we use that as sort of a proxy for how they'll do with reading, it can be tricky because so many of them do really poorly. They don't have any skills. So dynamic assessment is a way to kind of deal with that in that instead of evaluating what kids already know, we try to evaluate their learning potential or how they learn in the test. So instead of giving them a test item and seeing how they answer and saying yes or no, right or wrong, if they can't do the answer, if they can't give you the answer the first time around, we'll give some prompting. So maybe we'll tell them to try again. We'll give them some teaching. Try putting the sounds together together, blending the sounds together, you know, maybe reminding them. Put the sounds together using a little visual cue, like your fingers. And we'll also give them some. Some feedback so they know if they were right or not. So something like, oh, that wasn't quite right. Let's try again. Remember, put the sounds together. So in this way, dynamic assessment is a little bit more like what teaching in the classroom looks like, and it tells us a little bit about how the child is going to respond to a little bit of teaching in the task, and it can help Us figure out, you know, there are going to be some kids who will really quickly pick up on that teaching, that prompting and that feedback. And those students are probably more likely to go on and actually, you know, do well in the classroom. But there are going to be some students who, even when we do all of these little, like, tips and tricks, teaching, prompting, feedback, whatever it might be, still really struggle. And maybe those are the students that we want to spend more time, effort, and focus on supporting. And that can be for, you know, bi and multilingual kids. But it can also be for kids who speak English who've just had limited literacy experiences. Right. Like, this approach is not restricted to students who come from different language backgrounds. It can be useful for a variety of different students.

Dr. Samantha Amien (16:22)

So it's a way to know how to allocate support resources based on someone's like, ability to learn to read rather than like what they already know. Is that a fair summary?

Emily Wood (16:33)

That is a fair summary. And as an added bonus, from an educator perspective, not only do we maybe figure out a little bit, you know, better who really needs support, but through the process of giving the teaching, prompting and feedback, through that dynamic process, we also learn sometimes what actually helps that student. So we can take that information and then use it right away in the classroom. Whereas if we do sort of that traditional static approach where we just say, here's the question, right or wrong, and then we move on, we miss out on that opportunity to teach the child something, and we also miss out on the opportunity to learn what helps them be successful. So the benefits are kind of multiple, I guess I would say, in a dynamic assessment approach.

Dr. Samantha Amien (17:14)

Have you put it into practice at all in any small tests? And what'd you find?

Emily Wood (17:19)

So we tried this test out in kindergarten with year two or senior kindergarten students in Ontario. We had a sample of about 25 students and they spoke 17 different languages. The other thing that's also new about this measure that we're working on in our lab is that on top of it being dynamic, it's also what we would call linguistically quasi universal. Basically what that means is that instead of leaning into making items for the tasks that are specific to one language. So using a word like thumb or using a word like goose, which is definitely, those are English specific words, we try to make the items as language independent as possible. So we use made up non words, but on top of that, we make sure that those non words are made up of sounds or phonemes that are common to most languages. So remember when I talked about the Th, the sound being pretty unique to a small group of languages, sounds like m. Like the m sound. That's pretty universal. Almost every language has that sound in it. And so by doing that, we try to take as much of that bias that's related to language experience as possible. And we compared how they did on this new measure that I've developed that's dynamic and sort of language independent and our kind of traditional way of doing things like this English sort of static measure. And what we saw is that most of these kids on this English measure, they performed in what we would call like the at risk or like below benchmark range. So about like 3/4 of them perform in that at risk range, which is really tricky when you're a teacher. Like, how do you decide who needs help if 75% of your classroom needs help? Like, who am I going to actually help here? I can't help 3/4 of the class with that kind of intensive support that they might need. But what we found on our measure is that there were only about 25% of students who, after the teaching prompting and feedback that we gave them in this test, still couldn't make any gains or couldn't learn anything in the test. So in our mind, maybe those are the students who actually are going to need that support. But it's definitely an interesting finding about the different ways these students perform on these two measures.

Dr. Samantha Amien (19:38)

That's really cool. And it's interesting that it's quasi universal, as you said. As you were speaking and giving the thumb example, I realized my parents always argue about how to spell my name in Arabic because it's Samantha and there's no th in Arabic. So they use different characters. And when they're making me my name necklace, they were like, spell it like this. No, like this. And I was like, I can't read it either way.

Emily Wood (20:02)

So it could say this is a real life example of how the different sound systems of the language come into play. Yeah, no, it definitely makes a difference.

Dr. Samantha Amien (20:10)

Yeah, my name doesn't really exist in Arabic because they don't have that phoneme with the th.

Emily Wood (20:15)

But th sound doesn't exist. And Arabic is not unique that way. Most languages don't have it. Yeah, I didn't know that.

Dr. Samantha Amien (20:21)

That's super interesting. I remember seeing something at a neuroscience conference a long time ago that we have really broad phoneme recognition as kids. You can recognize almost every sound, even if it's not the sounds of the language spoke in your home. And then over time, that recognition window closes without exposure.

Emily Wood (20:38)

Yes.

Dr. Samantha Amien (20:38)

Is that, right?

Emily Wood (20:39)

It is, right? Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. So there's like that period where babies can differentiate between phonemes that are not part of their non native language, but then as they become more specific to the languages that they're exposed to, they lose that ability.

Dr. Samantha Amien (20:54)

It's super interesting and selfishly gives me some hope that I could learn Arabic because I was at least continuously exposed to it. So I gotta have some recognition there stored somewhere in my brain.

Emily Wood (21:04)

It's so true. And I mean, there's all these other factors, right? Like, but if the motivating force is like, connecting with family and connecting with culture, then, like, that's so much more powerful than just like, you know, I want to do it for the sake of doing it.

Dr. Samantha Amien (21:17)

Can you paint a picture for us of what literacy really means, practically speaking, and how we're doing over here in North America?

Emily Wood (21:25)

Yeah, that's a great question. Literacy is so important for every aspect of our lives. I mean, I think we often think about it traditionally in the academic sense, right? Like, you need to learn to read and write to be successful at school, but that also extends into your professional success. We use our ability to read and write at work and have a really significant impact on your professional outcomes. But even beyond that, it can extend into things like your physical and your mental health. Right. Just being able to be literate and to be able to be, you know, a member who participates in society, it really affects all different domains of our livelihoods. And how are we doing over here in Canada? Well, we're doing actually pretty well in Canada and in North America, if we think about things, you know, relative to other countries worldwide. But that doesn't mean that we can't continue to do better. I think we have, you know, some varied information, some varied stats about the proportions of children who have reading difficulties. You know, some will say up to a quarter, some will say one in eight. It really depends on, like, when we're measuring that and how we're measuring it. But because literacy is so important, I do think we should strive for less than a quarter or less than one in eight children struggling to learn to read or having reading difficulties, because it is just so important.

Dr. Samantha Amien (22:42)

And I think in the US the percentage of children and even adults with literacy difficulties is higher than in Canada. So it's clearly something that affects every country, no matter where you are in the world.

Emily Wood (22:56)

It definitely does. Yeah. Reading problems are common globally, across the world, and it's not really, you know, restricted to one place or location. It's everywhere. Yeah.

Dr. Samantha Amien (23:06)

Emily Wood is a speech language pathologist and researcher at the University of Toronto. Thank you so much for joining us. Emily thank you for having me.

Emily Wood (23:14)

It was great to be here.

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Dr. Samantha Amien (25:20)

There's a tech elephant in the classroom that also needs to be addressed. Artificial Intelligence A research team from MIT's Media Lab recently shared a study where they used EEG recordings to explore what's happening in the brain when we use AI tools while we're actively learning. The study design was pretty simple. There were 54 adult participants who were asked to write a series of essays. The subjects were sorted into three different groups. There was the brain only group, no AI or Google allowed, the search engine group, they could only use Google Search. And the last group was the LLM group who were allowed to use ChatGPT. They all wrote three essays that were graded by human teachers along with a specially created AI judge. And during all of this writing, researchers were recording activity across their brains with a little tool called an EEG electroencephalogram. If you've never had one, it's pretty cool. You get electrodes gelled to your head that measure the average electrical activity of neurons on the other side of your skull. In this study, it gave a picture of the writer's cognitive engagement. The team found some pretty clear differences in brain activity depending on which group the participants were in. According to the EEG, folks using ChatGPT had the lowest level of brain engagement. They were least mentally involved and did less while writing. Plus, as they wrote more essays, they got even lazier. By the third one, lots of them were just copying and pasting what ChatGPT gave them without much change. The teachers and AI judge said that these essays were all very similar and lacked originality. When asked about their work later, the subjects even had trouble remembering what they wrote, with many not even able to say whether a quote was from their essay or someone else's. On the other hand, the group that could only use their brain, no Google or AI. They showed the highest neural connectivity patterns, especially in regions that relate to creativity, ideation, understanding, semantics and memory. Kind of the front and top parts of the brain. This group was more engaged with the work. They remembered it better after the fact and expressed higher satisfaction with their efforts than the other groups. The search engine group, the kind of middle ground, also showed more active brain function than the AI group and had high satisfaction in their work. So there's a cost when using AI for education. Having a bit of friction or having to think through an answer rather than just relying on technology allows us to retain information, express creativity, and even have more pride in our work. Now, I do want to note that this study is still in the process of being peer reviewed. The lead author, Natalia Cosmena from MIT's Media Lab, told Time magazine that she wanted to release the work early because she fears an even bigger increase in classroom AI use before the paper would be fully reviewed for Warner Bros. Discovery. Curiosity Weekly is produced by the team at Wheelhouse DNA. The senior producer and editorial correspondent is Theresa Carey. Our producer is is Chiara Noni, Our audio engineer is Nick Karisimi and head of Production for Wheelhouse DNA is Cassie Berman. And I'm Dr. Samantha Yuin. Thanks for listening.

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