literacy & dyslexia

Social-Emotional Learning and Development

Literacy and social-emotional skills are among the most important skills in our knowledge-based economy and interconnected, diverse society, but we are not preparing students with these skills.

Learning and literacy are inherently cognitive, social, emotional, and cultural. Our feelings, culture, and social dynamics shape the way we think, learn, and become literate.

However, school experiences often are not designed with this in mind. This contributes to the twin crises we face in youth’s insufficient literacy and well-being.

Our Research

The UC|CSU Collaborative for Neuroscience, Diversity, and Learning is researching the social, affective, cognitive, and cultural processes involved in how individuals become literate.

With this research, we aim to inform the design of learning experiences that consider cultural dynamics that support key social-emotional skills in youth.

For example, in one line of work in partnership with USC’s Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education, we have shown that the more youth can respond to social stories by transcending the here-and-now to think about broad implications, the more they show healthy patterns of brain development across adolescence. Further, the ways their brains develop have implications for their identity and well-being in young adulthood.

Research and Resources

Gotlieb, R. J. M., Immordino-Yang, M.H., Gonzalez, E., Rhinehart, L., Peuschel, E., Mahjouri, S., & Nadaya, G. (2022). Becoming literate: Current perspectives on the coordinated development of reading skills and social-emotional functioning among diverse youth. Invited submission at Literacy Research: Theory, Methods, and Practice. https://doi.org/10.1177/23813377221120107

Gotlieb, R.,Yang, X.F., & Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2022). Concrete and abstract dimensions of community adolescents’ social-emotional meaning-making, and associations with broader functioning. Journal of Adolescent Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/07435584221091498

Gotlieb, R.,Yang, X.F., & Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2022). Default and executive networks’ roles in diverse adolescents’ emotionally engaged construals of complex social issues. Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 17(4), 421-429. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsab108