David Rose, the co-founder and co-executive director of the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), and lecturer at Harvard University, specializes in developmental neuropsychology and in the universal design of learning technologies. He completed his undergraduate work at Harvard University, received his master's degree from Reed College and his doctorate from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. David Rose, along with colleague Anne Myer, has authored an outstanding book entitled "Learning to Read in the Computer Age" In this exciting text, prefaced by Jeanne S. Chall , the authors brings to bear their backgrounds in the neurosciences and in technology to literacy learning in the electronic age. "Learning to Read in the Computer Age" can be accessed on-line at http://www.cast.org/LearningToRead/.

CK : Tell a little about yourself and about CAST (Center for
Applied Special Technology)

DR : CAST is now about 15 years old. It grew out of a clinic in a hospital where the founders worked as neuropsychologists evaluating children who were having a variety of difficulties in school. The majority of them were children with learning disabilities. Since school is so dominated by text, the vast majority of the children were having trouble learning from text in one fashion or another. We did traditional neuropsychological examinations but we came to believe that computers were likely to be very good tools. We worked in the hospital with kids and we worked with them using technology to see what did work and what didn't work -- in after school programs and in summer programs. CAST ultimately grew out of that work. We found that we wanted to do more Research and Development. We felt that the answers were not there yet: we had only done some preliminary stuff and we wanted to get answers. Eventually we split off from the hospital and we formed CAST in order to focus on the research and development work.

Learning Disabilities as Contextual- Showing up in Response to the Demands of the Environment

CK Were you focusing on helping students to deal with text primarily through technology?

DR Yes, although at that time we wouldn't have phrased it that way because we saw ourselves in what would have been called assistive technology. We wouldn't have phrased it as working with kids who were having difficulty with text. We were working with kids who were dyslexic and were considered learning disabled. We tend now to more view disability as very contextual. The disabilities show up in response to demands of the environment. The World Health Organization defines impairments differently than disabilities. So impairments are things that are about the individual and disabilities are more related to things that people can't do in the environment in which they are placed. Learning disabilities is the accurate term because it has to do with the contextual environment. Kids with attention deficit disorders are not attention deficit disordered in all contexts. It often happens in schools, so it is a much more contextual related definition.

CK This view is similar to interactive models of reading in its recognition of the role of the match between the reader, the text and environmental factors. Deriving meaning from text has to do with the interaction among all those pieces.

DR Yes, and in fact we like to think about each of the various media types and what demands they place on the learner. A particular media may serve to create a set of people who appear disabled. I gave a talk last night about oral presentations, about speeches. Speeches are very interesting to study in the same way that reading is. Speech is no longer the key modality in our culture that it once was. Although I think it is actually reemerging because media can take a speech and render it permanent. But for several millennia transforming language into text was the only way of making it permanent. But if you can have a person either listen to speech live or listen to it on videotape or audio tape, there is a somewhat overlapping but quite distinct population of individuals for whom such listening presents a major problem in learning.

CK So some groups of people would seem to be disabled if they were required to learn solely by listening. Are you referring to the generation of oral language as well?

DR Both. There is some overlap which is interesting to study, and that is because of the difficulties in learning and comprehending language in general of, course. Both of those modes, listening and speaking, can create problems for some people. For example, the memory problems of learning from just an oral presentation are greatly exaggerated over text. Most of the good speakers scaffold the memory problems of the audience and use repetition more than they would in text. They have organization strategies meant to decrease the memory load. It is very much more important to use anecdotes, stories in a speech than in a printed article for the memory aids. So people with memory kinds problems are scaffolded much more by text than by speaking. If we were to be like the ancient Greeks who were primarily oral there would emerge a somewhat different group of kids who would be showing up at the clinics.

CK Interesting. You seem to be saying that if we were to favor one language mode exclusively we would get a different group of people who would appear to be disabled or impaired. You made the distinction between disabled and impaired. Will you clarify that?

DR The distinction for me is that impairment is something that you carry. Your blindness is an impairment. A disability like a dyslexia is related to the actual informational environment and the way it is presented. So dyslexics are generally impaired in picking up information that is presented textually.

Development of Media with Multiple Supports Point a Better Way for all Kids

CK It is a very hopeful way of looking at things. To break out of a way of thinking about people and seeing disability from a broader perspective.

DR We do think so. We find that our work with individuals with disabilities points a better way of education for all kids. It sharpens us up to realize the strengths and weaknesses of various things we design in instructional media and in classrooms. When we solve the problems of children with disabilities, there will be better classrooms for everybody. And that is the approach that CAST is now investigating, which is the concept of universal design. CAST is looking toward designing materials and methods that have a broader application and include more people. Universally designed material has multiple supports and scaffolds built in with multiple means of expression and means of representing information. And therefore it happens to serve very well people with disabilities. However, these designs also serve the broader population who aren't disabled or who have strengths and weakness of various kinds.

CK This view fits in nicely with Howard Gardner's work on multiple intelligences.

DR Yes. There is a great book entitled "The Electronic Word" by Richard A. Lanham. Lanham, who is a classicist scholar, not a technician, argues that the new multiple media, and multiple means of representations that are becoming available will work as a democratizing force in education in that more people can succeed. The educational materials we would design will assist someone like George Lucas to do well rather than to do poorly just because text might not be his favorite media. But as an expressive media identifying what the alternatives are is a move that will help schooling in general but will be much better for people with disabilities.

Multiple Means of Expression and Representation are key to Universally Designed Software.

CK What are some of the principle features of universally designed software? Could you outline that and provide some examples of software that may incorporate some of those features?

DR We have learned that "one size fits all" designs are not adequate for curricula that address individual differences. There are three key areas when we talk about universal design that have to do with a framework adopted from the neurosciences. The first is that people differ in the way in which they succeed and fail to take in information. They have strengths and weaknesses in various modalities. So we look to provide multiple means of representing information. Some of these are very easy to do in an electronic format. You can, for example, always have any text read itself aloud in an electronic environment, so that provides two modalities. Some people find it really helpful to have both the visual and the auditory at the same time. We have certain people for whom that redundancy is really important. And for people who are blind reading the text aloud is key. Likewise, someone who is deaf will rely on the visual modality. In certain circumstances multiple representations of information can be good for everyone. For example, we all like captioned text when we are sitting in a bar or when there is a TV at the airport or at the gym. So multiple representations are good for everybody.

CK What is the second feature of universal design?

DR The second important area is multiple means of expression. We have strengths and weakness in the way in which we are able to express the knowledge we have. Some people can do well with writing, and some people really can't write at all. Obviously if our test of a person's intelligence is measured by their ability to handwrite a letter, then some people will be vastly underestimated. What will we do with people with cerebral palsy? They are people who often have the cognitive strength but they may not have the output modality you are asking for. Some people can speak much better than they can write. Some people can express themselves more effectively in images than in text. In fact, I was thinking about this on the way to work today. I have a nephew who is a news reporter and his starting salary is $18,000. His salary is so low because there are so many writers in the world that employers don't have to pay much. Whereas, I wonder what the starting salary is for web page designers. A web designer usually has to be good with texts because they have to write, but they also have to have some visual design and have to know what to do with sound. We have to pay a lot for web designers, and in fact this is the literacy that our kids are growing into. They will have to be able to write, but writing will no longer be sufficient. People who can only write will have low paying jobs. So the ability to teach our kids multiple means of expression is very important for any kid in the future. It is also critical for some people with disabilities for whom writing is a weakness. By providing other alternatives they can express their strengths and show that in fact they can be powerful communicators.

Redefining the Nature of Literacy

CK The nature of what it means to be literate is being redefined as we speak. How can educators prepare our students to be literate in the future? What will our students need to be able to do to be successful? It sounds like you are saying that it will take the ability to express themselves in multiple modes.

DR The word "composition" is key, but composition will involve more things than just writing. Some of these modes overlap and in fact even the process of composition now is realized in music, visual images, video, and text. In each of these modalities one needs to plan, draft, revise, and edit. Those processes are all part of written composition but they are not limited to text. In some cases we may find it is easier to teach kids the process of composition in a modality other than writing. For example, they may want to be a better communicator in drawing. They will place value on that kind of composition, and they can fully understand the importance of the elements of the composition process and take feedback. It would have been hard for them to do that in writing because it is such a bare wound for them.

CK Children who are not strong in writing have the opportunity to be successful in another mode. The literacy of the future sounds more complicated, however, because it involves creating and orchestrating text with all of the other ways of communicating information.

DR I think that is the first reaction. Literacy instruction for most teachers will feel like it is getting harder. I think that it is getting harder in more ways than one. It is getting harder in that we require a higher level of print literacy than we used to. When my mother was a teacher people didn't have to be as literate as they do now. We have to attain a higher level of print literacy across our culture. But we also have to prepare our students for the future, a multimedia future, so that we have to make literacy both deeper and broader. Literacy in text will not be enough. Teaching literacy is harder in a third way because we are including more people than we used to. Decades ago, we didn't bother with students who came from families where print wasn't important. Kids with disabilities were not included, and we didn't care about kids who didn't speak English. Teachers now have a higher level of literacy they have to try to attain, they have a broader set of things they are required to deal with and they have a broader set of students they have to succeed with. So here at CAST we think that teachers need better tools. A fixed textbook with "one size fits all" is not a good enough tool. Teachers will need tools that will responsive to individual differences. They don't have time to individualize.

CK What features of electronic environments will support the integration of technology into the curriculum so the computer won't be a dust collector or used for electronic recess?

DR We are using the power of technology to make textbooks more teacherly, more supportive, more like apprentice media. We are taking a student's regular history book where the content is history, not reading, but we are building reading support electronically into it. That would mean that it is a simple click to have every word read aloud or to get a word defined.

CK Including hypertext?

DR Hypertext, but it is the same history book that is reconstituted into both print and into an electronic version. With the electronic version you can vary the amount of support to the reader. In traditional text we don't have much choice. We can dumb it down to the level of a third grader. You don't really have many choices. We use the electronic version to raise the level of support. So you click on words to get support if you don't know how to read them. But now we are looking at higher levels of support - - how we can use technology to build comprehension, strategical support into the book itself. With these new kinds of readers, a child can electronically alter the book itself so that through electronics the book doesn't appear the same to everybody. So there is a version that seems right to each child.

Reciprocal Teaching Strategies Embedded in Electronic Version of Textbooks

CK Are you talking about altering the size of the print, and the format?

DR Yes and no. You can do all of those, but you can also use sound and color to emphasize things. So if there are certain things in the text that are vitally important to know and the beginning reader doesn't know what is important to attend to from what isn't, then you can scaffold that for them. The teacher can say, " pay attention to key points. I have made key points in red". You can highlight certain things. The ease of the technology allows us to embed prompts and scaffolds right into the text. We are working with Anne Marie Palincsar on Reciprocal Teaching Methods, on how we can build them into text. So that the book itself prompts you to ask a question of it or to make a summary in order to check yourself. At first they are very scaffolded in both the sense of making the meaning in the text very obvious, and secondly in making the strategies you need to use more obvious and in supporting you in the using of them.

CK It will be interesting to see if students with the help of technology as a scaffold come to use those strategies on their own.

DR Right. Our view of what a special education teacher would do would be to meet with a student around the issue of how supportive does the text need to be for them. And as they get better, when a student reaches a certain level, the teacher might explain, "Now you don't need as much support as you did- so let's turn that off so that you can be more independent as a reader."

CK The other piece is the background knowledge. In some cases children may not have the background knowledge to handle a given text. It seems like technology can work to build background knowledge as well.

DR We are playing with reading environments where a word clicks right to the encyclopedia so that you can get that background knowledge. Scholastic has a program Read 180 -- which scaffolds background knowledge with video. So before a student reads the passage they see a video that can equalize background knowledge and the video is a different representation. It is not a video of the text exactly but it provides background knowledge so that people will have heard the words, know the context as a key part of the support.

CK So far you have spoken about multiple means of expression and multiple means of representation as two of the three components of universally designed environments. What is the third component?

DR A third aspect of universal design involves multiple means of engagement. Kids really differ in what engages them as learners and if we don't pay attention to that kids can fail. Actually, these ideas match perfectly with a recent NRC report on reading which delineates three reasons why kids fail. They fail because they can't decode the words, they don't have strategies, and lastly because they don't care to do so. Some kids need a great deal of stimulation. And bells and whistles in software can provide some of that stimulation as long as it draws them into the text. For some kids that kind of stimulation is a complete turn off so just as we provide multiple ways to express oneself, there are changes in design as to ways to engage different students.

There is Not a Single Method of Teaching Reading, Multiple Processes Differ from Individual to Individual

CK In what ways does your background in neuroscience interface with reading research?

DR Multiple representations, means of expression, and engagement are three things to consider in designing environments for learning from a neuroscience background, but they are convergent with reading research background. In fact I think a lot of things we learn from a neuroscience research background and a reading research background are convergent and tell us the same things. One of them is that reading isn't one thing. There is not one thing called reading. There are multiple processes in reading and good reading teachers understand that . When we look at brain images of people reading we discover that "Oh wow" lots of different parts of the brain light up, there is not one reading center and good reading teachers know that they have to do multiple kinds of things. There is not one task, there is reading for different purposes, there are different levels of reading. And sure enough, when we watch the brain work, we see that it consumes energy quite differently according to the different tasks. So I think both kinds of research converge to say that it is a mistake to think of reading as one act when it is really a multiple set of things we do to get meaning out of text. We also know that individuals differ, and some are good with some aspects of reading and not others. Neuroscience research suggests that there are quite a few processes that we bring to bear when we are reading and good teachers naturally gravitate towards realizing that. Any teacher who thinks that there's a method makes a big mistake. There is not a method. We know to really strengthen all the various process that are important in reading.

CK In your on-line book Learning to Read in the Computer Age you make interesting links between neuroscience and the ways we think about reading. As educators we talk about word recognition, strategic processes and the affective domain as pieces that we believe are important in a balanced literacy learning. Neuroscience research supports the notion that all of these pieces are not isolated processes, but that they work together.

DR I think that it is really bad for us to think of a balanced reading approach as having two parts. I think that a balanced reading program as having three parts. We need to learn to recognize the cues in text. And there are ways in which we can teach and learn to recognize them. We need strategies for when we don't recognize those patterns automatically. Teaching involves modeling those strategies - showing kids when to use them and how to use them. That's a second key component of a balanced reading program. The third is that kids do have to love reading. In the mix of whole language versus phonics you need both of those and you also need to learn to love books and to love stories. And the desire to read is key. But learning to recognize patterns in text is quite hard for some kids. And if you are not pretty intentional about teaching them, they won't succeed.

CK I like how you think about pattern recognition. You look at sounds and letters, phonemic awareness, and the smaller units of language. But you also look at larger units of language. For example, you frame text organization, and even author style as pattern recognition. So conducting mini-lessons on author's style using an author's work and encouraging students to use authors as mentors for their own writing fits into your framework for pattern recognition. I have never conceptualized it in that way.

DR We were not sure that that would fly with the editors, Jeanne Chall and John Onofrey, but they actually liked it too. Jeanne Chall is a mentor of both of us. From a neuroscience framework that is how we think about them - as higher level patterns. There are actually considerable commonalties in teaching students to learn to recognize patterns. If we are teaching students strategies, then we've got to teach much more than just skill learning. We have to model for them, but then we've got to help them both to learn how to do things and to know what are the situations in which you should do them. Automaticity is a very important asset. You want to get so you can recognize the letters automatically. You can't teach them to be strategical about letters past the early stages. In every stage in learning to read you are in some way addressing/pressing new strategies. At fourth grade it might be about getting the author's point, at twelfth grade it might be about style. Can you recognize Hemingway's style? It might involve recognizing the way in which Hemingway writes. But it also means someone's got to teach you some strategies for looking at style. You learn how to look. You no longer have to learn how to look at individual words. You are good at that. But now you need to learn what are the combinations of words and sentences that goes to make Hemingway.

CK It is almost like helping kids to read like writers. Teaching kids to focus on the author's craft.

DR So that is using two parts of the equation, involving pattern recognition and strategies. But we also want them to love Hemingway. You do not want to kill it by making it a skills exercise. So to become strong readers we need to make sure that kids are reading text that they enjoy a lot. And if they are really having trouble with the word recognition part, well, we say, "Let's scaffold that a little so they can continue to enjoy reading and to keep them engaged".

CK With the right level of challenge and support.

DR Right. Get the challenge right. We may have to raise the level of support because there are a lot of kids who are dyslexic who can deal with the thematic material of Hemingway and Faulkner, but who can't deal with the decoding aspect of reading. We under educate them when we don't introduce them to various concepts and literary styles at their level. We can support the decoding in electronic environments. I think that that is a big change and one that is good.

Using Technology to Support the Reading of Text On-Line

CK What is the lesson here? I think it involves creating a balance - children need to have skills/ strategies, but need to know what is in it for them. They need to have the will to read.

DR I think the word balance is very important. I think that every kid everyday should read something just because it is fun and they enjoy the material. We are working on supported web reading with our learning disabled students because there is so much content on the web that is exciting and of interest to them. Also, it is a medium where they feel that it is a future thing, rather than a past thing. And we are quite supportive of that because we want them to read a lot. We want them to really enjoy it and that is that affective part of that. If you spend the whole day on remedial reading with these kids, then you will lose the war for having won the battle. You will come away with a few more decoding skills at the end of the day than they had at the beginning. But then they may hate reading even more. Whether you have supported reading or not, it is important for kids to read something that they really want to read, every day.

CK The web can be a powerful tool for learning about the world.

DR To them it is a very authentic environment. We have a web reader which allows help for those who have trouble decoding. It turns the web into a supported environment where all the words are live and you can click on them and they will read themselves to you.

CK Will it read whatever it is that is on the web?

DR Yes. Just like the Ultimate Reader does for standard text. It is a knock out for students with learning disabilities. It means that you go out on the web and not fall off of the cliff. It will read word by word to you or you can click on only those words that you don't know. The newer version we are working on now will also go to an electronic encyclopedia for any word that you don't know the meaning of. so you click on a word and it will go there. So it says to the reader that you can go out on this very rich environment and read things that you want to read, but this apprentice support will go with you. It is just an application which fixes itself onto regular Internet Explorer. It is very powerful.

CK I like the view of students as purposeful. That is, they will seek the help as needed. They are going to monitor what it is they don't know. They will have access as needed.

DR Again this is something that can be negotiated particularly with the special education teacher if a person is having trouble with using the web. The teacher can say, "I think you can be out on the web with only this level of support" or sometimes kids will say, " I don't need to have this read aloud to me anymore". We are doing research with this as we speak in a high school in Massachusetts, kids are using the web reader. A lot of the student with no reading difficulties like to use the pacing feature of the web reader. They turn the sound off and they find the pacing helps them keep their attention on the reading. The text is highlighted, and so they turn it on and they find that it keeps them focused and it draws them along. Like a lot of us who have learned speed reading, it helps them to read a little faster. It keeps their attention focused. We didn't anticipate that. So we now have a mode with just "Highlight" only.

CK The web environment can be so stimulating, too. So when I get on the web I am tempted to get off track. The highlighting feature would seem to be a way to keep focused.

DR They describe it that way. That without it they drift off. They are not getting through the material fast enough so the highlighter moves them along. We are exploring its impact on comprehension.

Schooling Keeping Pace with the Communication Medium of our Culture

CK In closing, I would like you to describe your vision of the role of technology in the future classroom.

DR Right now new technology is used to teach old things. That is the way new technologies come into existence. First we use them for something that we are already doing. Eventually we discover the real power of the new technology to do something we didn't expect. Right now we are in the early stages using technology in classrooms. We are still using the new technology as electronic workbooks or for electronic recess. We are using the new technology to try to teach the old. I think in the future that the new technology will be just the medium that kids use. Kids will be learning a new kind of literacy that is more expansive, that has more elements in it. Teachers worry about that, but that kind of literacy will also have a better chance to succeed because more children can be successful. And it will be the technology that the culture is using. Children will know that they are learning about a literacy that is valuable to them now. Right now school children are not sure that what they are learning will pay off in their culture. The things that they pay ten dollars to go and see aren't made by writers. They don't go to the Fleet Center to see writers do their readings. I don't think that is necessarily a good thing, but it is important that children will see that school will cover the full range of things they need to learn to be successful in our culture.