
Dr. Joanna Christodoulou, Director of the MGH Institute’s BEAM lab, sheds new light on an under-studied problem.
A recent study by an MGH Institute researcher finds that reading disabilities can differ by socioeconomic status, which can help educators tailor how students are taught to read.
Dr. Joanna Christodoulou, Director of the graduate school’s Brain, Education, and Mind (BEAM) Lab, said research does not often consider socioeconomic status (SES) when studying reading outcomes in students with reading disabilities (RD). So, she and her team recruited more than 150 school-age students from a wide range of SES backgrounds based on parents’ income, education, and occupation to determine how reading disabilities compare across the SES continuum. This research goal shined a spotlight on a group of vulnerable readers - those with the challenge of RD and lower SES - that has often been excluded from prior work. Most research on reading disabilities, she said, does not take socioeconomic factors into account sufficiently, or at all, does not include lower SES families, and often does not leverage both brain and behavioral science.
“Struggling readers from lower SES backgrounds often show reduced test scores compared to students whose parents are of higher socioeconomic means,” said Christodoulou, who also is an Associate Professor in the Institute’s Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. “But our work added a new insight, which is that on average, children with RD differed in components of reading that were difficult, and corresponding brain regions also showed different wiring based on higher versus lower SES groups of students with RD. These results matter because they diversify our understanding of RD from expecting the same areas of challenge to recognizing potential differences underlying reading difficulty, and this knowledge can better guide how we assess and instruct students to read.”
Christodoulou’s team used several techniques in collaboration with colleagues at MIT including Dr. John Gabrieli, using brain imaging and clinical tools. They used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the brain during reading activities, as well as paper and pencil tests common in clinical and education settings. Christodoulou described this method of research as brain science complementing behavioral science. And, unlike most studies that focus on reading, Christodoulou’s work enrolled students across the SES continuum without and with reading disabilities such as dyslexia, which affects an estimated 20% of readers in the United States. Her paper detailing the study, “Socioeconomic dissociations in the neural and cognitive bases of reading disorders”, was published in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.
For students from higher-SES backgrounds, Christodoulou said RD was associated with phonological skills, or the ability to process language sounds, and related brain regions, a common finding in reading research. However, students from lower-SES backgrounds showed stronger associations between RD and orthographically driven skills, along with associated brain regions, that allow readers to process printed language.
“This finding is important for its accounting of the full range of SES in studies of reading development and disabilities, as well as for recognizing the potential impact of a child’s environment for their brain’s tuning as children learn to read,” she said.
Reading acquisition is a product of both genetics and environment and their interplay. For example, the environment includes both the home setting and the school context – how many books are available to a student, how often they read or are read to, what type of reading instruction is used, etc. When reading ability is appreciated as both a skillset a child develops as well as the context within which those skills emerge, it can be determined ways in which students may struggle differently based on higher or lower socioeconomic status, she noted, adding that researchers have the opportunity to learn about the range of strengths and challenges different students may face.
“We want students to develop into readers who can enjoy the process of learning because they can process written language with ease,” she said, “regardless of socioeconomic contexts.”
Learn more about the BEAM Lab and its ongoing studies.
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