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Kathy Rastle @kathyrastle.bsky.social · 7d

** New ** Seeking Postdoctoral Research Fellow (3 yrs) for ESRC project on skilled reading in Arabic. Based in my lab at @rhulpsychology.bsky.social and collaborating with @denisdrieghe.bsky.social (Soton) and Sami Boudelaa (UAE). Please share! jobs.royalholloway.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...

Job Opportunity at Royal Holloway University of London: Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Applications are invited for a 3-year, full-time Postdoctoral Research Fellow position in the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London.This position is funded by an ESRC resear...

jobs.royalholloway.ac.uk

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Reposted by Kathy Rastle

Carl Hendrick @carlhendrick.substack.com · 27d

Academic papers ask "Does X improve learning?" but schools need to know "Does X improve learning enough to justify its implementation costs compared to alternative Y?"

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Kathy Rastle @kathyrastle.bsky.social · Aug 19

I just paid £9 for each pair of branded socks (for a state school).

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Kathy Rastle @kathyrastle.bsky.social · Aug 19

🎯

Daniel Lakens @lakens.bsky.social · Aug 15

An abbreviation (ABB) in a journal article (JA) or Grant Application (GA) is rarely worth the words it saves. Every ABB requires cognitive resources (CR) and at my age by the time I'm halfway through a JA or GA I no longer have the CR to remember what your ABB stood for.

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Reposted by Kathy Rastle

Thinking Reading @thinkreadhq.bsky.social · Jun 10

🥳 The ‘holy grail’ of reading inventions that was birthed in NZ & exported to the world has finally been dumped. Now the way is clear for children to receive scientifically-based instruction & stop being instructional casualties. H/T @kathyrastle.bsky.social

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

AJLD EMINENT RESEARCHER AWARD WINNER 2024 Professor James Chapman: The rise and demise of reading recovery in New Zealand

Reading Recovery (RR) was introduced throughout New Zealand during the 1980s, for children struggling the most with learning to read after 1 year of formal schooling. In May 2024, the Minister of E...

www.tandfonline.com

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Kathy Rastle @kathyrastle.bsky.social · Jun 9

Did you read the blog and the Times article it was responding to?

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Kathy Rastle @kathyrastle.bsky.social · Jun 8

I’m starting to get threatening emails from predatory journals. They are accusing me of deliberately not responding to their requests to publish a two-page paper in a journal from a different discipline and saying that I need to respond with 24 hr to “end it smoothly”. 🤣

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Kathy Rastle @kathyrastle.bsky.social · Jun 8

"Systematic phonics... is affordable, replicable and deliverable across thousands of state schools.... That matters. In education, if it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t work."

David Didau @didau.bsky.social · Jun 8

NEW - Why phonics is still our best bet
open.substack.com/pub/daviddid...

The Dyslexia "miracle school" is no model for the masses

Why phonics - though no panacea - is still the best bet for disadvantaged children

open.substack.com

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Reposted by Kathy Rastle

Maryellen MacDonald @maryellenmacdonald.bsky.social · Jun 3

Thrilled to announce that my book MORE THAN WORDS (Avery/Penguin Random House) is out! It explains why language production has huge positive effects on talkers: attention, emotion regulation, exec function & more. Accessible science for general audiences! www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/724046...

More Than Words by Maryellen MacDonald, PhD: 9780593545270 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

"This beautifully written book by Maryellen MacDonald demonstrates how 'word-work' shapes both our experience of the world and the very brain that produced our capacity to articulate and generate our ...

www.penguinrandomhouse.com

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Reposted by Kathy Rastle

Diane Coyle @dianecoyle1859.bsky.social · May 30

I had to read this several times as “prioritise growth” and “hit universities over the head” are so mutually contradictory

Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · May 30

'Universities will be lucky to avoid being “completely hit over the head” in the UK government’s upcoming spending review as ministers look set to prioritise plans for growth – which could eat into core research funding – and save higher education reform for a later date.' 1/3

Universities face ‘tough’ spending review after brutal few months

Potential reprioritisation of parts of research budget could heap pressure on institutions already counting cost of immigration and tax changes

www.timeshighereducation.com

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Kathy Rastle @kathyrastle.bsky.social · May 21

Thanks Megan!

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DamsonEd @damsoned.bsky.social · May 21

Great blog about how children learn about morphology- @dccolen.bsky.social has been looking at this too and has some interesting ideas about how to structure the teaching in schools…

Couldn’t agree more… spelling teaching is patchy! And driven by an exam in Yr6.

bsky.app/profile/kath...

Kathy Rastle @kathyrastle.bsky.social · May 20

What can children learn about morphology when they read for pleasure? We analysed the words in 1200 books suitable for children and young people to find out! Read the blog post here: www.rastlelab.com/post/what-ca...

What can children learn about morphology from reading for fun?

A key part of becoming a skilled reader is understanding how words are built — that is, how small parts of words that carry meaning come together to form words. For example, the word unhappy is made u...

www.rastlelab.com

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Reposted by Kathy Rastle

Jamie Reilly 🦜 @reilly-coglab.com · May 20

Updated our lab's psycholinguistic database page to include Kathy Rastle et al's new web interface for the Children and Young Peoples Books Lexicon (CYP-LEX). Check it out! Give me a holler if you want us to link to your dataset or know of others I've missed. www.reilly-coglab.com/data

Psycholinguistic Databases, Stimuli, Utilities — Concepts & Cognition Laboratory

www.reilly-coglab.com

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Kathy Rastle @kathyrastle.bsky.social · May 20

What can children learn about morphology when they read for pleasure? We analysed the words in 1200 books suitable for children and young people to find out! Read the blog post here: www.rastlelab.com/post/what-ca...

What can children learn about morphology from reading for fun?

A key part of becoming a skilled reader is understanding how words are built — that is, how small parts of words that carry meaning come together to form words. For example, the word unhappy is made u...

www.rastlelab.com

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Kathy Rastle @kathyrastle.bsky.social · May 20

** New resource ** We analysed the characteristics of words in 1200 books suitable for children and young people. Properties of each word (frequencies, etc) are now available in an interactive website.
cyp-lex.rastlelab.com

CYP-LEX

Discover what words children and young people encounter when they read

cyp-lex.rastlelab.com

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Kathy Rastle @kathyrastle.bsky.social · May 19

Campaign groups in the US, UK and India claim that TV subtitles will help children learn to read. But our new research published in @psychscience.bsky.social shows that children don't even look at subtitles until they can already read at around 1 word per second.

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Kathy Rastle @kathyrastle.bsky.social · May 13

** Subtitles - not a magic bullet for literacy **

Find out about our new research published in @psychscience.bsky.social. tinyurl.com/SLSubtitles

@rhulpsychology.bsky.social @notts-psych.bsky.social @nuffieldfoundation.org @niftyfoxcreative.bsky.social @royalholloway.bsky.social

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Alex Quigley @alexjquigley.bsky.social · Apr 29

This Department for Education short course on ‘Supporting reading in secondary school’ is an excellent free resource with useful video to build understanding for this crucial area:

www.gov.uk/government/p...

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Susie Dent @susiedent.com · Apr 18

A reminder of a pretty etymology to brighten the day. The ‘daisy’ takes its name from the Old English ‘dæges ēage’, ‘day’s eye’, because it opens its petals at dawn, and closes them again at dusk.

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Reposted by Kathy Rastle

The Experimental Psychology Society @exppsychsoc.bsky.social · Apr 4

EPS Meeting: University of Dundee. 8th – 11th July 2025.

A joint meeting with the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science (CSBBCS).

Submission portals for this meeting will open at 10am (UK Time) on April 7th 2025 for a minimum of 24 hours.

eps.ac.uk/next-meeting/

Next Meeting

EPS Meeting: University of Dundee. 8th – 11th July 2025. This will be a joint meeting with the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science (CSBBCS), and will include the 53rd B…

eps.ac.uk

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Reposted by Kathy Rastle

Susie Dent @susiedent.com · Apr 4

Word of the day is ‘quiddler’ (18th century): one who focuses on unimportant issues while avoiding the important ones, or who fiddles/plays golf while Rome burns.

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Maria Korochkina @mariakna.bsky.social · Apr 4

Very important work led by the brilliant Anastasiya Lopukhina shows that widely publicised claims about subtitles helping children learn to read need to be tempered - just published in PsychScience: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Where Do Children Look When Watching Videos With Same-Language Subtitles? - Anastasiya Lopukhina, Walter J. B. van Heuven, Rebecca Crowley, Kathleen Rastle, 2025

Influential campaigns in the United Kingdom and the United States have argued that same-language television subtitles may help children learn to read. In this s...

journals.sagepub.com

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Dr. Dave Kenneth Tayao Cayado @dkcayado.bsky.social · Apr 4

Had an amazing time talking about my work on visual word recognition and Tagalog morphology @exppsychsoc.bsky.social! 🧠🔤🔡 Thanks to everyone who attended my talk. 🫶🏻

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Reposted by Kathy Rastle

Christopher Such @suchmo83.bsky.social · Mar 30

Here's the pitch:

Almost every primary school I've encountered is worried about the effectiveness of their approach to teaching reading after phonics and whether it provides pupils with engaging reading experiences.

My book offers a tried-and-tested alternative.

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Kathy Rastle @kathyrastle.bsky.social · Mar 30

It's not just clinical research either!

Masud Husain @masudhusain.bsky.social · Mar 29

Thank goodness people are waking up to the fact that there is a crisis for clinical research in the UK @financialtimes.com High on the list are the bureaucratic processes that have become an obstacle to getting things done

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