[Reading-hall-of-fame] Re: neuroscience

Sat Feb 20 17:39:40 GMT 2021

Thanks for the increase in value of the post, Colin!

P David Pearson 510 543 6508 ppearson at berkeley.edu

On Feb 20, 2021, at 8:46 AM, Colin Harrison <Colin.Harrison at nottingham.ac.uk>
wrote:

Hi all

Thanks so much for sharing some great insights on neuroscience.

Here is my one cent’s worth (or to be more forward-looking,
0.00000017463588 Bitcoins-worth).

Here at the University of Nottingham, we are justly proud of Professor Sir
Peter Mansfield’s Nobel Prize-winning work to develop MRI in the 1970s, and
of course our Psych department has worked with the Med School and Physics
departments on fMRI brain imaging. One important fact to note is that the
latest hardware delivers no fewer than 400,000 pieces of imaging data a
second, and it can produce a ‘slice’ of multicoloured imaging showing
neurone activity in any plane. Our colleague Professor Shaaron Ainsworth,
does a telling presentation that shows an image of the brain activity of a
person who is reading, and guess what? As we expect, there are lovely
highlighted spots in the left superior temporal and bilateral supplementary
motor regions, etc, etc, but hold your applause- Shaaron then showed other
‘slices’, from the same instant of imaging, and these suggested that during
one instant (not even 'one second') of ‘reading’ there are about fifty
areas of the brain that are active, and they are all flashing like an
over-decorated house at Christmas. In other words, you can use the ‘slice’
you prefer, and then superimpose multiple shots of the same area, to
increase the ‘activity’ profile, and then create your own ‘simplified’
image for your presentation…

In an interesting Damascene conversion, Prof Ahmad Hariri at Duke has
questioned 15 years' worth of his own publications on MRI, basically
revealing that when you do replication studies, even with the same
participants, you not only get different results, you get correlations that
are not only weak, they are poor
<https://today.duke.edu/2020/06/studies-brain-activity-aren%E2%80%99t-useful-scientists-thought>.
He went so far as to say “The bottom line is that task-based fMRI in its
current form can’t tell you what an individual’s brain activation will look
like from one test to the next”.

So of course fMRI will continue to be valuable for generating hypotheses
about cognition and learning, but with Hariri, I would suggest that at
present such research is precisely as valuable as papers in the 1970s on
quantum mechanics- i.e. they are unproven theories- but unlike CERN, we
haven’t yet built our equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider for brain
research.

David, you now have a nickel, or a total of 0.0000008731794 Bitcoins. O
darn it, by now those bitcoins are probably now worth 6 cents!

As ever,

Colin

From: <reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> on behalf of P
Pearson <ppearson at berkeley.edu>
Date: Saturday, 20 February 2021 at 04:57
To: Carol D Lee <cdlee at northwestern.edu>
Cc: Shirley B Heath <sbheath at stanford.edu>, reading hall of fame <
reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>
Subject: [Reading-hall-of-fame] Re: Walter MacGinitie

Interesting perspective from Carol in response to Shirley’s concern that
neuroscience is lined up on the context-free cognitive side of the ledger
and will end up casting doubt on sociocultural and sociocognitive
understandings of literacy and language.

Because I have been working on a project (the NAEP Reading Assessment
Framework) in which this very issue is prominent, I have been, through
Carol, introduced to a completely different neuroscience perspective from
the one that those of us in reading research see so prominently displayed
in the so-called Science of Reading debate, which is focused on the
neuroscience (read FMRI) research demonstrating that even (maybe
especially) expert readers recode orthographic representations into a
phonemic/phonological representation in the journey to a semantic
representation of meaning.

The neuroscience perspective that Carol has brought to my intention is well
documented in the Science of Learning and Development literature that is
carefully reviewed in several papers by Carol and others AND featured
prominently in the 2018 How People Learn II volume. The fundamental move in
these accounts is to demonstrate that context, culture, and situation
actually shape the physical and neural processes that learners use in the
search for coherent understandings of phenomena, including those inscribed
in text.

So rather than think of neuroscience as aligned with a narrower view of
cognitive, language, and literacy development, we should think of
neuroscience as reflecting the same tensions we encounter in developmental
and pedagogical accounts of these three phenomena.

That’s my 2 cents worth in support of Carol’s.  And endorsement would bring
us up to a nickel.

Pdp

P David Pearson 510 543 6508 ppearson at berkeley.edu

On Feb 19, 2021, at 6:41 PM, Carol D Lee <cdlee at northwestern.edu> wrote:

Hi All,

So I always find interesting these generational distinctions between who is
old guard and not.  At 75 I like to push elderhood, except when I talk to
Edmund Gordon, who will turn 100 in June,  for whom I’m still a youngin.
However, because I didn’t enter the academy until I was in my mid-forties,
I guess I’m somewhere in that in between generational space.

So thinking in response to Shirley’s comments --- I think emerging work in
the neurosciences opens up interesting opportunities for more traditional
language and literacy folks, just as the cognitive revolution and attention
to the role of schema played a useful role in research around reading
comprehension.  The uptake of that cognitive work was less so taken up by
strict cognitive psychologists.  In the same vein, emerging findings from
the neurosciences have deep implications for the practice of reading or the
practice of teaching others to comprehend texts, it is not likely that they
will be the folks to take up the implications of that work.  Dan Schwartz
co-authored several articles a few years ago on the limitations of basic
research in the neurosciences around brain functioning for the teaching of
mathematics.

I think the task of the emerging generation of language, literacy and
culture researchers is to spread their wings to understand the basic
research in relevant areas of the neurosciences, spread their wings to
understand fundamental propositions in the field of human development, and
then to test empirically the implications of foundational work in these
areas.

I have been deeply interested in the last decade in the implications of
physiological processes we inherit from our evolution as a species for what
it means on the ground to think about the design of robust learning
environments – in my own area with regard to literacy.  I initially begin
to explore these ideas in my 2010 AERA Presidential Address.  *That was the
time when Dick Anderson and I were great dance partners at my presidential
party !!!!*  Since that time I’ve spread my wings to co-author a handbook
chapter with two folks in the neurosciences (Andy Meltzoff and Pat Kuhl).
Boundary crossing is challenging but really interesting.

So Shirley I don’t think the neurosciences will take over our field.
Rather I think they will make substantive contributions to our
understanding of the sheer complexity of text comprehension, but we need to
support and encourage upcoming generations to learn to cross intellectual
borders.

My 2 cents!

Carol

Carol D. Lee, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus

School of Education and Social Policy

Northwestern University

Member, National Academy of Education

Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Fellow, American Educational Research Association

Fellow, National Conference on Language and Literacy

President-Elect, National Academy of Education

Member, Reading Hall of Fame

*From: *<reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> on behalf of
Shirley_Brice_Heath Heath <sbheath at stanford.edu>
*Date: *Friday, February 19, 2021 at 4:34 PM
*To: *Richard Anderson <csrrca at illinois.edu>, "Leu, Donald" <
donald.leu at uconn.edu>
*Cc: *reading hall of fame <Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>
*Subject: *[Reading-hall-of-fame] Re: Walter MacGinitie

You are so right, for he was such a gentleman, ever ready to help younger
scholars.  I first met him in that role after I began seeing my work
interpreted as related to reading research.  He seemed puzzled by that, as
was I in many ways, but he was so helpful to me and many other scholars.

Yes, I see the "old guards" leaving us with greater frequency than we could
have imagined.  What we do not know is what will replace what we now think
of as the "old guard" along with their ideas.  I predict it will be
neuroscience research with more and more revelations about how the brain
works in both oral language and in written texts.  That work now appears in
many different journals, so we will see further division within that field,
all to our advantage in learning more about the many miracles of just how
we learn by taking in information from very varied sources.

Thanks to all willing to share memories about the full humanity of the "old
guard."  What will happen now that much of the research on reading and
related activities has gone to neuroscience will be increasing divisions
within that field.  Keeping up will get harder and harder, for sure.  My
fear is that those working within departments with titles such as
"language, literacy, and culture" will begin to feel either left behind or
pushed in new and exciting (though challenging) directions.  I wonder if
others are seeing similar patterns within their departments and among their
colleagues in the age bracket of 40s-60s.

Best to all, and thanks for the memories!

Shirley
------------------------------

*From:* reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk <
reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> on behalf of Richard
Anderson <csrrca at illinois.edu>
*Sent:* Friday, February 19, 2021 1:59 PM
*To:* Leu, Donald <donald.leu at uconn.edu>
*Cc:* reading hall of fame <Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>
*Subject:* [Reading-hall-of-fame] Re: Walter MacGinitie

I first met Walter MacGinitie in the late 1950s at a conference for
graduate students held at Northwestern. He represented Teachers College. I
represented Harvard. Another person I got to know at the conference was
Gordon Bower, then a grad student at Yale. My first job was at New York
University. We saw Walter and Ruth a couple of times in New York and I saw
him at conferences in subsequent years. With the passing of Walter and
other giants in the field, it seems we are at the end of an era. Or maybe
just the end of my era.

Dick

Richard C Anderson

University Scholar and Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois

Member, National Academy of Education

On Wed, Feb 17, 2021 at 2:53 PM Leu, Donald <donald.leu at uconn.edu> wrote:

Sadly, I report that another member, Walter MacGinitie, has passed.  I
never knew Walter personally, only his important work, but word travels
among members of the environmental communities concerned about the San Juan
Islands of Washington. Walter lived on San Juan Island and he and his wife,
Ruth, hadgifted 13 acres of important land to the San Juan Preservation
Trust, an organization that my wife and I, as boaters who enjoy the
islands, contribute to.    A tribute recently appeared in the SJPT
newsletter:  https://sjpt.org/remembering-walter-macginitie/
<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/sjpt.org/remembering-walter-macginitie/__;!!DZ3fjg!uaQMx0MjECCG-H9dbMd8mJz9YP89SfkKyjksfaPQBvoVAsBA_a_1YG6sVnuNLOFe$>

Be well.

Don

—
Donald J. Leu, Ph.D.

"Every  one of us is given the gift of life, and what a strange gift it
is.  If it is preserved jealously and selfishly, it impoverishes and
saddens. But if it is spent for others, it enriches and beautifies.”
  -- Geraldine  Ferraro.
     Acceptance speech at the 1984 Democratic Party National  Convention.

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