International Conference 2024 - Keynote Speaker: Professor Catherine McBride

Catherine (Cammie) McBride is currently Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science and Associate Dean for Research for the College of Health and Human Sciences at Purdue University.

She was previously the Choh-Ming Li Professor of Psychology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 2022, she and her team received approximately USD4 million in grant money to study literacy development and impairment across both Chinese and English, as well as mathematics development and impairment, in Chinese children.

Professor McBride previously served as President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR) and Founding President of the Association for Reading and Writing in Asia (ARWA). She was also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) for three years. McBride currently serves on the Board of The Reading League—Indiana and is co-leading a USD1.5 million dollar grant from the Lilly Foundation to improve teacher training in the science of reading in Indiana at Purdue University.

Much of Professor McBride’s current research is devoted to improving online assessment and training of literacy and mathematics skills. The author of more than 250 peer-reviewed journal articles and editor of six books, McBride wrote both Children’s Literacy Development: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Learning to Read and Write (2016) and Coping with Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, and ADHD: A Global Perspective (2019). Her most recent (as co-editor) book (2023) is entitled the Routledge International Handbook of Visual-Motor Skills, Handwriting, and Spelling: Theory, Research, and Practice.

Q & A with Professor Catherine McBride...

What do you love about being a researcher/educator?

I love working with others on important ideas. I really enjoy the collaborative aspects in particular. No one researcher has all the tools necessary to carry out optimal research. I cherish the ability to work together with others who share a curiosity/passion for understanding literacy development and impairment across cultures.

What are you working on right now?

Our lab is creating and piloting a battery of online assessment tools that can be used to look at children’s reading-related skills in English. We started some of these in Hong Kong, where children learn to read and write English as a foreign language from the age of 3, but these have been adapted for use with native English speaking children. The assessment battery includes vocabulary knowledge, phonological skills, word reading, spelling, morphological awareness, and rapid automatized naming. We hope to test models of literacy learning online using these tools.

Why is it important and what impact do you hope it will have?

There are many tests of English literacy skills for children. However, most cost money and take a lot of time and energy to administer. If we can develop tools that are open sourced and either very inexpensive or free, that will be helpful for identifying children’s strengths and weaknesses in literacy learning. Of course, we will need children to try these tasks in order to get some reasonable age-appropriate online norms. However, if all goes well, these tools will serve as “quick-and-dirty,” fairly accurate indicators of literacy skills. Such indicators will be helpful to anyone who uses English as a first or additional language of learning in school. We hope that teachers, parents, and students will all benefit from these.

Where can I find out more?

Here is a link to one of our recent tests to try: http://wordsword.cayanedu.com/

This one is on word reading itself. We have three publications on the test for those who are interested. This is one of those publications: https://link.springer.com/arti...

What other historic or current research are you particularly interested in and why?

We have published some work on Chinese, English, and Korean Hangul using a tool called delayed copying. In this work, we “flash” (very quickly) words that are (hopefully) unknown to young children and ask them to write down what they can remember. For example, a 6-year-old seeing the word “predilection” might just write down a “p” or an “n,” the first and last letters of the word. However, some children might remember larger units of this word, such as “pre” or “tion,” because they have learned these as units or morphemes. Answers are scored using partial scoring. In several studies, we find that children’s abilities to recall and reproduce more parts of words or Chinese characters is associated with better spelling. We think that this delayed copying task, adapted from others’ previous work, could be a very good clinical indicator of spelling skill longitudinally. At the same time, it is difficult to pin down precisely what construct it is measuring (a bit similar to RAN in this respect). Our excitement comes from the fact that this measure is quick and easy to administer and very good at predicting variability in spelling.

What do you hope will be researched in the future?

There is often a lot of “hype” about particular computer programs/packages that can help to remediate dyslexia. However, there typically are not a lot of research studies to back these up. At the same time, there is a strong need for online (inexpensive or free) training that can help children with word reading or word spelling difficulties. I would like to see more research on what online programs actually work, how to improve online training tools, and how to get these tools to children who need them.

If you could recommend one book or article to a member of the public interested in dyslexia and other specific learning difficulties, it would be:

I cannot recommend just one. I have to mention the book that I wrote in which I combined research with interviews of parents, teachers, and those with dyslexia and other learning difficulties as one that I would hope that members of the public would consider reading, because it was written for that audience: https://www.amazon.com/Coping-Dyslexia-Dysgraphia-ADHD-Perspective/dp/1138069663#customerReviews

I really appreciate the 2016 book edited by L. Peer and G. Reid) entitled Multilingualism, Literacy, and Dyslexia: Breaking Down Barriers for Educators (2^nd Ed.) (Routledge). This book is helpful in thinking through issues related to language learning for those with dyslexia.

Tell us something interesting!

I lived in Hong Kong for 26 years and in Germany for one. I have now moved back to my hometown to be closer to my parents and work at Purdue.