How do math, reading skills overlap? Researchers were closing in on answers.

Nadine Gaab.

Harvard file photo

Science & Tech
How do math, reading skills overlap? Researchers were closing in on answers.

Grant terminated at critical point of ambitious study following students for five years

Liz Mineo

Harvard Staff Writer

July 23, 2025 6 min read

For cognitive neuroscientist Nadine Gaab, the termination of a five-year grant one year before it was scheduled to end couldn’t have come at a worse moment. As part of a study aimed at understanding the co-development of math and reading skills over time from preschool through elementary school, Gaab and her team of researchers had followed 163 students for up to four years. In May, before the study’s final year, they were preparing to test the participants to see which children were on the trajectory to develop math and reading problems.

“This was the most important year because we were going to see who of these kids developed typical reading and math skills versus atypical reading and math skills.”
Nadine Gaab

But since Gaab’s research was terminated as part of the federal funding cuts the Trump administration announced in May, which froze more than $2.2 billion in federal grant money in its ongoing clash with Harvard, the research couldn’t be completed. Recently, it received bridge funding from Harvard Graduate School of Education, which will cover minimal research. But Gaab’s team will not to be able to reassess participants’ brain development, a crucial part of the study.

An associate professor of education at the Ed School, Gaab said she cannot overstate the impact of the grant termination.

“This was the most important year because we were going to see who of these kids developed typical reading and math skills versus atypical reading and math skills,” said Gaab, principal investigator of the Gaab Lab. “It’s like if you’re trying to prevent heart disease, and you’re examining a number of protective and risk factors for four years, and at the end, you want to see who developed heart disease and who didn’t. Now, with the grant being terminated, we can’t determine who, of all the kids, has math or reading problems. It is just devastating.”

Although researchers primarily recruited preschoolers from the New England area, the significance of the termination extended beyond the region. Each year, several families — some from as far as California and Alaska — traveled across the country to Cambridge to participate in the groundbreaking study that also tracks the children’s brain development. For many families, the chance to receive annual reports on their child’s math and reading development was reason enough to engage in the journey.

Called the Children’s Arithmetic, Language, and Cognition (CALC) study, it intended to explore how math and reading skills develop and interact over time, using a comprehensive testing battery of language and cognitive abilities, measures of brain structure and function, as well as reports of the home learning environment.

“We wanted to see the role of the environment or having an older sibling or a parent with a reading disability in shaping these trajectories.”
Nadine Gaab

Through community engagement efforts, the researchers at the Gaab Lab managed to recruit a unique sample for this study, including kids with family histories of reading difficulties, math difficulties, or both. It is known that children coming from these families have a higher risk of developing a learning difficulty themselves. The goal was to examine the trajectories of math and reading skills development in these groups to identify when and how they diverge from typically developing children. “We wanted to see the role of the environment or having an older sibling or a parent with a reading disability in shaping these trajectories,” said Gaab.

Researchers were hoping that the $4.1 million grant would also shed light on a phenomenon education experts have noticed: the high co-occurrence of math and reading disabilities in some students. Experts hypothesize that if students struggle with language or reading, those difficulties could potentially disrupt the understanding of mathematical concepts.

“There is a lot of language involved when we teach math,” said Gaab. “But there are other aspects that can play a role, such as working memory or executive functioning that are needed for both reading and math skills, and we are interested in overlapping brain regions that could explain this high co-occurrence.”

Beyond understanding the interaction between language and math development, the study’s findings could also have had serious repercussions for how math is taught during the first few years of formal education and further influence the development of early screening instruments, said Gaab.

“An implication of this work was not only to develop early screening instruments to find kids at risk, but also to see whether we should change the way we teach math,” said Gaab. “And that involves maybe teaching math a little bit differently or paying attention to kids who struggle with language when you teach math.”

“An implication of this work was not only to develop early screening instruments to find kids at risk, but also to see whether we should change the way we teach math.”
Nadine Gaab

Due to the grant’s interruption, Gaab had to let go of several team members and terminate a subcontract to a university in Canada that included a postdoctoral fellow. The necessary training for research staff can be long and intensive, with abrupt funding cuts potentially disrupting Gaab’s research well beyond the immediate future, even if the grant were to be reinstated.

Gaab is grateful that her research was selected for bridge funding from the University that at least allows the researchers to test some of the students’ reading and math skills. Conducting neuroimaging research via MRI on the participants will be too expensive, said Gaab, but examining their math and reading outcomes after four years of formal instruction will bring valuable lessons.

“Knowing how math and reading skills develop over time in typical and atypical populations could help us develop early screening tools,” said Gaab. “We could see early on who may struggle or be more likely to struggle. It can also help developing intervention tools to know how we can best help those struggling students and can lead to a better curricula design to teach reading and math. This is a study that can help any child and educators in the long run.”