The proposal was based on a long standing collaboration, of academic and student/faculty staff exchange between Boston University and the University of Maryland, for the Medical School and the Computer Science Departments of the UoC, respectively. The University of Maryland, however, decided not to proceed to signing the inter-institutional agreement required for the programme to be put into practice. For that reason, we asked that it was substituted with Harvard University in Boston, a change that was granted. A similar problem arose with Boston University, the legal dept. of which took about a year before signing the agreement required. Within this agreement the UoC sent a Master's student in the US, without ever receiving one though . Boston University argued that their regulations made it difficult for a student to attend a part of their programme abroad.In the end, nearly just before the end of the extension we had been granted for the programme, the mobility between Harvard and the UoC took place, with a Faculty staff member of the later to travel to the US for a teaching programme. Boston University This University committed to consider the possibility of signing a new Erasmus agreement in the future, as the independent existing exchange programme between the two institutions remains active (exchange of medical students for laboratory and clinical training)Harvard UniversityThe collaboration with this University will be continued within the successful international mobility project granted for 2017, within which more mobilities have been approved. The teaching programme of the Faculty staff member who participated, was the basis of a long standing collaboration of academic and laboratory work, with one of the best American Universities.

Reading is the single most transferable skill taught in the elementary school years; it is the foundation for academic learning, economic contribution, and societal participation. Decades of research shows that efficient reading relies on precise mental spelling representations of individual words. These orthographic representations enable children to recognize words by sight, releasing cognitive resources for understanding what they read. Orthographic Learning (OL) is widely considered the mechanism through which readers build orthographic representations and develop efficient reading. And yet its foundational skills have not been established, a gap in knowledge that severely limits our ability to teach children the skills they need to achieve efficient reading. LEXIS will identify the foundational skills of OL and, in turn, efficient reading, so that we can develop effective instruction. LEXIS is a large-scale cross-language longitudinal study, following children from preschool through grade 2. Through LEXIS, I will establish the foundational skills of OL for both typical and dyslexic readers; results for typical readers can be applied to whole classrooms and results for children with dyslexia will be the basis for effective teaching for children with the most intractable reading difficulties. I will conduct this study with two distinctive languages: English and Greek; their similarities and differences will ensure that results can be applied across the diversity of European languages. LEXIS takes an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together educational psychology, special education, and psycholinguistics. Data will be analysed with cutting-edge statistical and computational modeling approaches. Through LEXIS, I will identify which foundational skills most strongly predict OL and word reading development. These identified skills will guide the foci of effective instruction, ensuring that all children achieve the strongest possible reading outcomes.