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Center Title: University of Washington Multidisciplinary Learning Disabilities Center (UW LDC)

Center Director: Virginia W. Berninger

Funding Source: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) at the National Institute of Health (NIH)

The University of Washington Multidisciplinary Learning Disabilities Center (UW LDC) is a cross-campus collaboration that investigates nature-nurture interactions in children with persisting reading and writing problems. To date, faculty from 5 departments and over 50 graduate students from 6 departments have been involved in the research activities of the UW LDC, which is the first collaboration between a College of Education and a School of Medicine to study learning disabilities.

To date, the various studies conducted in the center have (a) developed and validated instructional interventions for preventing and treating reading disabilities, (b) demonstrated that professional development for teachers on the language processes involved in reading and writing improves student learning outcomes, (c) identified the language processes that are most consistent with a genetic basis in dyslexia, a developmental reading disorder characterized by undue difficulty in reading words despite good verbal comprehension, and (d) showed that dyslexics differ from good readers in patterns of brain activation on specific language tasks before but not after language-based instructional interventions we developed. The treatment and brain imaging studies were featured in Newsweek in November, 1999.

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