Supporting Executive Functions in Reading: Putting the Thinking on the Table with Kelly Cartwright, Ph.D.

Excellent decoders are not always excellent comprehenders. Many times, our students seem to have all of the necessary skills they need to be good readers (things like phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension strategies, to name a few), but somehow, they still struggle with putting all of these things together in order to comprehend texts. In this workshop, we will dig a bit deeper than the familiar skills listed above to explore essential thinking skills, called executive functions, that support successful reading comprehension.

In this session, participants will learn:

• How self-regulatory executive function skills fit into an Active View of Reading
• How to identify students with specific reading comprehension difficulties (strong word reading abilities but surprisingly low reading comprehension)
• How executive function difficulties often go hand-in-hand with, and underlie, reading difficulties
• How to implement science-based interventions to support active comprehension in students who “read” but don’t comprehend.
• Insights and take-home strategies for helping students achieve an active, meaning-focused approach to print.

All participants will receive a copy of Dr. Cartwright’s book Executive Skills and Reading Comprehension – 2nd Edition. 

Audience: K-8 teachers, special education teachers, reading interventionists, reading specialists

About Presenter: Kelly B. Cartwright, Ph.D. is the incoming Spangler Distinguished Professor of Early Child Literacy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Formerly a Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Teacher Preparation at Christopher Newport University, Kelly directs the Reading, Executive function, And Development Lab (READLab) and studies the neurocognitive and affective factors that underlie reading processes and difficulties from preschool through adulthood. Her groundbreaking book, Executive Skills and Reading Comprehension: A Guide for Educators, now in second edition, is the first comprehensive text at this intersection. She regularly works with educators throughout the US to better understand and improve reading, and these experiences inform her research.