Brains that don't read well

Illiteracy is a major problem in the US. Leiden education specialist Paul van den Broek was flown to Washington DC by the National Academies of Sciences to inform them about cognitive and neurological research into reading comprehension. He will deliver his inaugural lecture on 2 November.

They might be able to read words and sometimes even sentences, but in many cases that's the limit. Many young people and adults experience great difficulty in understanding texts. According to the website of the Dutch Reading and Writing Foundation - the chairman of which is Princess Laurentien - 13% of Dutch adults suffer from iliteracy: they have such difficulty in handling text that they are unable to function adequately in society.

National Academies

Not only is this a major handicap for the sufferers themselves, it is also an economic problem. In the US, the issue of illiteracy has now been recognised at federal government level and is being addressed. The National Institute for Literacy requested assistance from the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) – the academic advisory body for the federal government. The NAS put together a commission to investigate the measures and the research that were most urgently needed, and that should therefore be given priority in funding.

Top experts

Leiden Professor of Educational Science, Paul van den Broek, was invited to provide this commission of experts with scientific ammunition. Professor Van den Broek studies the cognitive processes involved in reading, and the related neurological structures and processes. As the only foreign scientist in the group of top experts, he was able to present the state of the art of the field and the desired new steps in the research. An enormous honour, and 'exceptionally interesting,' according to Van den Broek. ‘Being grilled by such a commission of top experts and listening to what the other three guests had to say was a tremendous intellectual experience.'

From pre-school to adults

Through the commitment and evidence of Dutch 'celebrities', the problem of illiterate adults in our own country has become less taboo. Professor Van den Broek: ‘In the US, too, the issue of illiteracy among young people and adults is relatively new to the policy agenda. Ten years ago there was a wave of research and policies about pre-school developments. Now more attention is being focused on young people and adults. A reasonably high percentage of people who ought to be able to read adequately are apparently unable to do so. Even though reading texts in the form of mails, forms, folders, textbooks, manuals and light reading is, of course, a basic requirement of being able to function in society.'

How do we understand text?

Van den Broek's specialist field is not so much combining letters and phonemes to form words, but understanding the text. What happens in the brain when we read and understand a text? If we find this difficult, what is the cause, and how can you do something about it in teaching or in different therapies? He makes use of techniques for studying brain activity using scans, as well as techniques that record eye movements during reading. He was appointed as Professor in Leiden in 2008. Prior to this he was affiliated to the University of Minnesota, where he still has nominal connections today.

Sub-groups of poor readers

It's important to realise that there are different groups of poor readers, according to Van den Broek. 'And it is worthwhile investigating what the problem is for these different groups, so that you can design dedicated interventions. We have been able to identify sub-groups of poor readers who perform equally badly in tests, but for whom further study has shown that they have different problems. Some of these individuals are, for example, only looking for meaning within the text, without relating the text to knowledge that they already possess. Others do use their background knowledge, but they they extract irrelevant knowledge. We have developed interventions for each type of poor reader.'

Grouping information

Van den Broek: ‘You can try to help people to read better, but you can also adapt the texts. The question is, how can you produce texts so that it is easier to extract information from them? If you know how a reader reads, you can make texts that compensate for the weaknesses in comprehension. For immigrants capable of a high level of comprehension, but with a poor knowledge of Dutch - or in the US, English - it is important to compose a text with a lot of frequently used short words. But for someone who has no problem in recognising words, but who has more difficulty in relating fragments of information, the pieces of information that belong together should be close together in the text, and possibly also repeated together.'

Measuring eye movements during reading.

Everything is public

Van den Broek was assigned the subject Developmentaland Neuroscience Models of Text Comprehension by the NAS in Washington. The three other guest experts were asked to focus on the maturing - a euphemism for ageing - brain, the dual language brain and the influence of genes and environment on reading development. The result will be a report intended for the government, but also for the public, that should result in a new teaching and research agenda. Van den Broek: ‘Everything that happens in this commission is public. In the United States, accountability is extremely important. The government always has to be able to justify its actions to the public as a whole in these kinds of issues.'

Reading and writing

His field of research is new; a great deal of research has already been carried out on cognition and behaviour, but the neurological side of things is still a new area. Van den Broek: ‘There are a lot of questions still to be answered. For example: do children learn differently from adolescents and adults? Do adolescents learn differently from the elderly? How does reading comprehension work in second language speakers? What common processes are at the basis of reading texts and writing texts? Which processes are universal and which are language- or culture-related? When can you ay that there really is a disfunction?'

Brain activities during reading good and poor texts.

Teaching strategies

And these are just the basic questions. The implications for teaching strategies, techniques and material such as computer programmes and reading material are a research field on their own. It is clear: the American financiers will need more than just a few million dollars.

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Paul van den Broek has been a professor in Leiden since 2008; his teaching and research remit is 'Educational Sciences, in particular the cognitive and neurobiological backgrounds of learning and teaching'. He is also one of the co-ordinators of the University's interdisciplinary research profile area on Brain Function and Dysfunction over the Lifespan. He is member of the Institute of Educational Sciences of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, and also plays an active role in the interfaculty Leiden Institute for Brain & Cognition (LIBC) and in LIBC-Junior. This last organisation studies the brain in development in an interdisciplinary context.

Bachelor's
Educational Sciences (in Dutch)

Master's
MSc Education and Child Studies
Master's specialisation in the Applied Neuroscience of Education and Child Studies
Academic Teacher Training
The Academic Teacher Training programme

Minors
Educational Sciences: an introduction
Interdisciplinary Minor Brain and Cognition

(20 October 2009/HP)

Web Editor

Last Modified: 17-11-2010