November 4th, 2025| 1 min readResearch Matters

‘Our goal is to build bridges between the lab and the classroom’

By studying why some kids struggle to read, cognitive neuroscientist Jason Yeatman hopes to make education work better for all students and deepen science’s understanding of the brain.

In the “Research Matters” series, we visit labs across campus to hear directly from Stanford scientists about what they’re working on, how it could advance human health and well-being, and why universities are critical players in the nation’s innovation ecosystem. The following are the researchers’ own words, edited and condensed for clarity.

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My big interest has always been how experience shapes brain development. In our lab, we study the neurobiology of reading and the interplay between brain development and learning more broadly, trying to understand how a child’s experiences in the classroom sculpt the development of brain circuits that do incredible things like turn print into sound.

A big part of that is focusing on learning differences – why some kids struggle and how education can be reconfigured to better suit each individuals needs.

One of our discoveries was that there’s a particular region of the brain known as the visual word form area that’s involved in rapidly transforming text into language. In children with dyslexia, this region is slightly smaller on average and it is less activated by text compared to other types of visual images. Is this a stable trait of the dyslexic brain that is constantly causing a challenge with reading, or is it just reflecting the differences in experience that students have had? We discovered it’s both – when we get a child with dyslexia into a high-quality intervention program, we see this region growing larger over the course of weeks and the pattern of activation in the brain changing. But we can also see that even after the intervention, subtle differences remain.

All good neuroscience research starts with precise and accurate measures of behavior. If we want to understand the brain circuits that are involved in reading, we have to characterize reading abilities in a comprehensive and precise way. That work was the foundation for the assessment tool ROAR (Rapid Online Assessment of Reading), developed during the pandemic and now being used by more than 600 schools all across the country.

Kindergarten reading screening typically takes about 30 minutes per student and is administered one-on-one by a teacher. With ROAR, you can assess a whole school district in 20 minutes. ROAR is totally free through a research-practice partnership model. Our goal is really to build bridges between the lab and the classroom.

A lot of the research we’re doing with ROAR is trying to understand the mechanisms that lead to that variability in learning outcomes, such as how differences in the way the visual system encodes information predisposes children to potentially struggle learning to read.

New York City Public Schools, the largest school system in the United States, is in the process of adopting ROAR right now. That’s 55,000 teachers and 1.2 million students. We’re doing research at an unprecedented scale, collecting data that is truly representative of the diversity of educational experiences around the U.S.

California is the 42nd state to pass legislation requiring universal screening in grades K, first, and second for reading challenges. But one of the challenges of these legislations is that schools arent resourced to actually intervene and give the kids the support they need.

“Systems change is going to come from reimagining the model for how products get into schools.”

Yeatman is working to build deep connections between research and practice in education.

More than identifying challenges early, what we need are integrated systems for assessment and support that go from kindergarten through high school. Through our research with ROAR, we discovered that there are many schools across every state, whether rural, urban, suburban, or exurban, where 10 or 20% of the middle school and high school students are still lacking basic foundational literacy skills.

It’s sad that no one has caught and addressed this problem earlier; these students are almost certainly struggling across every class. But it’s also an opportunity, because reading skills are actionable – if students are struggling because they can’t decode multi-syllabic words, thats a solved problem. It’s just a resource allocation issue.

So one of our hopes in doing this work through a research-practice partnership model, where we help schools build a multi-tiered system of support, is that they’re poised to address these problems that arent unique to them but are representative of U.S. education.

For most of us on the academic side of education research, we’re doing this because we’re interested in solving these challenges. We’re interested in understanding what are the aspects of curriculum that really work for every student, to figure out what works best for whom and under what circumstances. We’re not in it to sell a product.

I am interested in systems change, and I don’t think systems change is going to come from another, better product being sold to schools. I think systems change is going to come from reimagining the model for how products get into schools. And I want to reimagine that model in a way that builds deep connections between research and practice.

In education, the system of academic research and the system for procurement of products in classrooms are quite disconnected, and that’s where I have a lot of excitement, in trying to close that gap.

For more information

Jason Yeatman is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education, in the Department of Psychology in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and in the division of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at the School of Medicine. He is also the director of the Brain Development & Education Lab.

Photographer

Andrew Brodhead