"From the Lab to the Classroom and Back: The Virtuous Cycle between Education and Neuroscience"
Educational interventions offer a powerful tool to understand how a child’s environment shapes the development of specialized brain circuits for new cognitive functions such as literacy. I will first present a series of intervention studies that highlight the dynamic interplay between white matter plasticity, functional properties of the reading circuitry, and the process of learning to read. I will conclude by introducing an innovation from this work – The Rapid Online Assessment of Reading – that is both improving the efficiency of educational assessment in the classroom while, simultaneously, unlocking opportunities to study the mechanisms of learning at an unprecedented scale.