Welcome to the
Gaab Lab
at HGSE!
About Us
Our lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education investigates how people learn and develop from infancy to adulthood, with a focus on language and reading. Using behavioral and neuroscience methods, we study how learning abilities and disabilities develop over time, and use these insights to inform education policy and create global impact.
Hover/tap below to learn more about us!
Neuroscience
We study how language and reading skills/difficulties develop from birth through adolescence using longitudinal brain imaging. By combining comprehensive, age-appropriate language and reading assessments with neuroimaging, we examine the neurobiological, behavioral, and environmental factors that contribute to, or protect against, language-based learning disabilities.
Neuroscience
Learning (Dis)abilities
Our research focuses on identifying factors that contribute to learning disabilities and developing frameworks to explain learning differences, including both risk and protective factors, across early childhood. Our work emphasizes early identification of at-risk children through accessible literacy screening tools, advocating for the concept of ‘preventative education’.
Learning (Dis)abilities
Policy, Outreach, and Impact
We translate our research into systems-level, actionable change in practice and policy. This includes creating accessible EdTech tools for early literacy screening in schools and at home, and actively sharing our findings with community members, including policymakers, education leaders, teachers, and advocacy groups.
To read more about our literacy screening tools, please see Screening for Reading Impairments.
