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Carroll’s connection and commitment to select research partners has always been a cornerstone of our educational mission. In fact, it was the work of a pioneering clinician — Dr. Edwin M. Cole, a neurologist and Director of the Language Clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital — that helped lead to Carroll’s founding almost 60 years ago.

Bridging the gap between cutting-edge science and its application in the classroom gets to the heart of our mission — to give each child what they most need to thrive. Without a doubt, by thoughtfully participating in research around language-based learning differences (LBLDs), like dyslexia, Carroll students and researchers alike have a lot to gain: 

• Our students receive interventions and programming that are optimized and tailored to their individualized learning profiles.
• By modeling lifelong learning, we cultivate these same powerful mindsets in our students, developing resilient, adaptable learners. 
• Our research partners are able to refine and advance their work through real-time, in-the-classroom insights into the practical application of their studies.

Today, we proudly collaborate with six research partners. Here’s a bit about each of them, and how their research is changing the trajectory for children with LBLDs.

John Gabrieli, Ph.D.

Director, Gabrieli Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research

For more than a decade, thanks to a relationship forged between former Head of School Steve Wilkins and neuroscientist Dr. John Gabrieli at MIT, Carroll has supported Gabrieli’s lab in its efforts to better understand how the brain empowers learning. Most recently, as part of the lab’s READ study (Reading, Executive Function, Attention, Dyslexia), participating Carroll students could be seen sliding into fMRI machines, giving Dr. Gabrieli and his team, along with Dr. Joanna Christodoulou (see below), a glimpse into the brain activity of students who have dyslexia and attentional challenges.

Maryanne Wolf, Ed.D.

Director, UCLA Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice

Carroll and Dr. Maryanne Wolf, a preeminent dyslexia researcher and former faculty member at Tufts University, have been longstanding collaborators, well before my time as Head of School. (Fun fact: While in graduate school, I was one of Dr. Wolf’s students.) Her insights into the cognitive processes of the dyslexic brain have guided our thinking about how best to teach our students. Currently, our Lower School teachers are piloting her revised RAVE-O literacy curriculum in grades 1-3, and we are providing her with valuable feedback to support its further development.

Joanna Christodoulou, Ed.D.

Director, The Brain, Education, and Mind (BEAM) Lab at the MGH Institute for Health Professions

Dr. Christodoulou’s work applies neuroscience findings to the education of students with dyslexia. She is particularly interested in how dyslexia and executive functioning challenges intersect, and what classroom approaches — grounded in neuroscience — lead to the best student outcomes. Her current research includes the READ study, summer outcomes for struggling readers, and brain behavior outcomes of reading intervention.

Our partnership, which has amplified over the last four years, is multidimensional. Dr. Christodoulou is a valuable case consultant and thought partner in our consideration of the most effective teaching methods. She provides webinars for Carroll families and professional growth seminars for our educators on a range of related topics. And she supports ongoing research and research design around Carroll’s Targeted Cognitive Intervention (TCI) work as well as our Neurolution work (see below). 

Currently, we’re collaborating with Dr. Christodoulou and Dr. Gabrieli’s labs on the Carroll CARES study (Confidence, Advocacy, Relationships, and Emotions Survey). A longitudinal study piloted with our fourth and sixth grades this year, CARES is designed to help us better understand how our students’ confidence and advocacy skills build over time at Carroll and beyond, and what variables are involved in the development of these skills. In the future, we hope to share our newly created tool and findings with the field.

Jason Yeatman, Ph.D.

Director, Brain Development & Education Lab at Stanford University

Director, Reading and Dyslexia Research Program

Dr. Yeatman and his team at Stanford are interested in how the brain’s reading circuitry develops in response to education, and how targeted interventions can lead to changes in the brains of children with dyslexia. He led the development of ROAR (Rapid Online Assessment of Reading), a suite of online assessment tools that evaluates foundational reading skills. Over the last few years, we have helped him to test this tool with our middle schoolers. With input from our TCI team, in collaboration with Ben Shepard ’02, we provide Dr. Yeatman with feedback as to which tests are most valuable and informative, and how well they integrate with our own student data system. The goal is that this user-friendly assessment tool — which Dr. Yeatman’s team is expanding to include executive function and math measures — can ultimately be made available to a much wider range of educators, including those not specifically trained to work with kids with dyslexia.

Dr. Yeatman and his team continue to be great collaborators who are at the forefront of the future of reading assessments. . . Their measures are complementary additions to our diagnostic toolbox and have a lot of potential to help us ‘give every child what they need’ as well as understand and identify areas to work on when students have a more complex learning profile.

Ben Shepard '02TCI Curriculum Coordinator

Meredith Rowe, Ed.D.

Saul Zaentz Professor of Early Learning and Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education

Dr. Rowe leads a research program focused on how parent and family factors influence children’s early language and literacy development. She investigates key features of early communicative environments that support language and cognitive growth, with the goal of developing effective intervention strategies for caregivers. Her work has been funded by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and other private foundations. Widely published in leading education and psychology journals, Dr. Rowe brings her deep expertise in language and literacy development to Carroll’s Research Advisory Board.

Neurolution 

Co-founded over a decade ago by Steve Wilkins, Neurolution is a consortium of schools that combines student data, neuroscience, and teacher professional learning to improve outcomes in kids with learning differences. For Carroll, the student data piece comes from our use of TCI, our Targeted Cognitive Intervention, used to grow and improve cognitive skills, like reaction time. We combine these data with students’ cognitive testing, curriculum-based data, and normed assessment within a digital platform that organizes an individual student’s learning profile — their unique strengths and weaknesses — so we can more effectively focus our interventions. In partnership with Dr. Gabrieli, we are working to document TCI’s efficacy. Neurolution schools share their findings in order to improve the ongoing development of the program and related research.    

Watch this video to find out how TCI works:

Research Advisory Board

Helping us to make sense of all this robust data and research — our own and that of our partners — is our newly formed Research Advisory Board. Three times a year Carroll convenes this group of highly accomplished researchers and scientists. We share what we are learning from our research partners and what we are seeing in the classroom, and Advisory Board members share their own professional insights and feedback. These conversations are tremendously valuable in our collective journey to unravel the complexities of dyslexia and improve instructional approaches and outcomes for students.

It’s an exciting time to be engaged in this research, as science and technology advance at record speeds. Our mission and history drives our obligation and eagerness to contribute to the field. Carroll students benefit, yes, but also students and families well beyond Carroll. Working together — improving the lives of current and future students with dyslexia — we all win.