While it would seem that effective reading would be a critical asset for educational success, some get by using other means.

Educational psychologist Rauno Parrila has spent his career at the U of A exploring those other means, whether he is researching problematic reading development or trying to figure out compensation techniques of high-functioning dyslexics, both outside and inside the classroom.

“I bring research into the classroom every day,” said Parrila, who teaches classes on research and on assessment. “Most of my classes are about research-consumption skills; how do we pick research apart? What makes good research? What is evidence? What can we count as evidence?”

Parrila, who is a 2010 recipient of a Killam Professorship, says it is important for him to teach his students to be able to clearly identify ideas that have an evidence base and those that don’t.

“In many instances we are looking at research that has yet to be published to see where it fits into the discussion,” said Parrila, who is also an editor for Scientific Studies of Reading.

Parrila says constant discussion means it is important that his students are equipped with a solid understanding of theory.

“You need a way of looking at things more than you need details,” he said. “Details change, details you can find, but if you don’t have a way of looking at things, it is all the same—it is all a mess.”

Originally from Finland, Parrila decided to pursue his PhD in educational psychology at the U of A in 1992 under the guidance of famed U of A education professor, J.P. Das, after taking in a presentation by Das on his theory of information processing.

Parrila says his initial focus was how students with learning disabilities keep their behaviour on target at any given moment and manage to complete their daily tasks. From there, Parrila’s research drifted toward looking at normal versus problematic reading development.

“What we have been looking at is those information processes—how the brain processes information—that are needed for reading to develop normally and, if reading doesn’t develop normally, what processes are not working? What are the underlying reasons for reading problems?” he said.

Parrila says his main contribution is in a specific process named “rapid naming,” or the speed at which a child can repetitively name objects or colours, and the importance of rapid naming for developing particular reading fluency.

Although there are several interpretations to why results differ, Parrila says it is probably an indication of the integrity of those narrow networks in the brain that support reading development. “Even before you learn to read, that neural network is there. This task somehow taps into how well that neural network works.”

Parrila is working with high-functioning university students with dyslexia who are passing their courses and getting degrees yet still have significant problems in terms of word-reading fluency, or how fast they can recognize words.

“When word recognitions are mostly automatic, a reader can focus on trying to understand the sentence and the paragraph. This is a critical assumption in most theories of reading comprehension,” he said. “When you have dyslexia, that automaticity on the word level doesn’t develop.

“What we find with university students with dyslexia is that they are not automatic on the word level, but their comprehension is as good as anyone else. No existing theory explains how this is possible and we are trying to figure out what are the compensation methods that they are using.”