Vanderbilt Kennedy Center (VKC) member Marcia Barnes, Ph.D., is Dunn Family Chair in Psychoeducational Assessment and a professor of Special Education. Her research focuses on the cognitive processes associated with difficulties in reading comprehension and mathematics in children with neurodevelopmental disorders and children at risk for or with learning disabilities.
In the interview below, Barnes shares how she became interested in disabilities research, describes her current research projects, and highlights how becoming a member of the VKC enhances the work she does.
How did you become interested in developmental disabilities research?
I worked at the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children for several years as a neuropsychologist. My caseload included children and youth with spina bifida, neural tube conditions associated with hydrocephalus, acquired brain injuries, and various genetic conditions associated with brain bleeds, such as sickle cell anemia and hemophilia. I became very interested in what was known about the relations of neurocognitive and academic outcomes to these early injuries to the developing brain, which I pursued as a scientist in the SickKids Research Institute.
Over the years, I have become increasingly interested in children with learning differences and whether those learning differences were related to injury to the brain or not. About 15 years ago, I came to the U.S. (Houston Health Sciences Medical Center) to receive training in conducting randomized controlled trials on interventions for children with learning difficulties. This is the type of work I continue to do today, though the focus has shifted to working with children who have specific learning disabilities.
What are your current research interests/projects?
We are currently running two randomized controlled trials. One is with middle school students with persistent difficulties in reading comprehension, which we know from previous work is strongly related to difficulties in inference-making. Inference-making involves integrating ideas across words and sentences as well as integrating what is in the text with one’s general world knowledge to make meaning out of the text. We are testing a novel inference-making intervention delivered either in small groups by a trained tutor or via a computer and comparing both of those situations to each other as well as to the schools’ typically provided interventions. This trial takes place in schools in Nashville and in Texas.
In addition to finding out whether one or both of the inference-making interventions helps to improve reading comprehension in these middle school students, we are also interested in finding out whether how a child responds to the intervention might be related to both reading-related skills such as their fluency in word reading as well as to other non-reading characteristics, such as their anxiety around reading and their tendency to mind wander or lose their focus of attention during reading.
We also have current work in mathematics testing the effectiveness of combined academic and cognitive interventions for children who are having difficulty acquiring mathematical knowledge in kindergarten. Because there is a high overlap of attention difficulties (including ADHD) and math disabilities, we are testing whether combining attention and math interventions is advantageous for math learning compared to providing the math intervention with additional math practice. We have designed attention training games that seek to improve attention in general as well as those that facilitate the child’s focus of attention on numbers.
Why is this work important/how might it have an impact on the lives of people with disabilities and their families?
Learning disabilities constitute the largest disability category in U.S. schools and in most countries around the world, so it is critical to design and assess interventions for this large population of children. Our early intervention work in mathematics seeks to find ways to prevent math disabilities from becoming debilitating by providing intensive intervention in both mathematics as well as in the neurocognitive abilities that support early learning.
Given that about 70% of children entering and exiting kindergarten with low math skills go on to have math learning disabilities by fifth grade, kindergarten provides an important developmental timepoint to improve young children’s learning trajectories. Middle school literacy skills are highly predictive of postsecondary academic and career success, but we know a lot more about how to improve literacy in younger at-risk children than we do for these older children who have long histories of reading difficulties. I believe that middle school provides a later developmental window of opportunity to effect positive changes in literacy outcomes. We cannot give up on finding what works for these older students.
What are your reasons for becoming a VKC Member? How does the VKC enhance the work you do?
As a new member of the VKC, I appreciate the sense of common purpose and community that an organized center provides for a researcher such as myself. I am also interested in finding out more about the range of basic to applied research that VKC members conduct. I’ve gotten to know more about the Center’s mission of facilitating research to practice for children with disabilities and families, and I am particularly looking forward to learning from those in the VKC how their approaches might be applied to the types of children (and their schools and families) with whom we work.
