writing about reading
Pearson, P. D., & Spiro, R. J. (1980). Toward a theory of reading comprehension instruction. Topics in Language Disorders, 1(1), 71-88.
Rand Spiro and I wrote this piece over a period of a couple of years in 1978-80, building off my earlier accounts of the utility of schema theory and Rand’s characterization of the ways in which Schema Theory was able to explain the typical roadblocks that kids run into when trying to render text meaningful.… Read the rest
This is the second installment of the name saga…
Fast forward from Grade 1 to my sophomore year in high school. 16th birthday coming up in April of 1957. In the 1950s, turning 16 is a triple witching hour of sorts—have to get a driver’s license, register for Social Security, AND register for Selective Service (the draft for those of you born after 1980).… Read the rest
Photo by Taffy Rafael
It wasn’t all just writing tech reports at CSR!
We played basketball at CSR on Sunday mornings. In this photo, I am posting up against Ralph Reynolds, who was finishing his PhD with Dick Anderson at the time.
The first week of first grade was especially hard for me. I was greeted with not one but two surprises, both of which were traumatic for my not very resilient 6-year-old ego.
But first a word about my school—a classic prairie style one room schoolhouse in what were then, just after WWII, the wide open spaces of the Sacramento Valley.… Read the rest
Finished the D in 1969 but did not get it published until 1974-75 in Reading Research Quarterly. That’s a long story that is told in a later piece with Kate Frankel in 2013 or so.
Pearson, P. D. (1974-75). The effects of grammatical complexity on children’s comprehension, recall and conception of semantic relations. … Read the rest
I developed these ideas when I was thinking about writing a second edition of Teaching Reading Comprehension. Never finished it (at least I had not as of 2018). My ideas about what kids need to learn about Figurative Language before they leave the K-12 system.… Read the rest
… Read the restI developed these ideas when I was thinking about writing a second edition of Teaching Reading Comprehension. Never finished it (at least I had not as of 2018). My ideas about what kids need to learn about F&O before they leave the K-12 system.
This is the first article I ever published. I like to say that I was the “l” in “et al”
Bormuth, J. R., Carr, J. W., Manning, J., & Pearson, P. D. (1970). Children’s comprehension of between- and within-sentence syntactic structures. … Read the rest
During the International Literacy Association Meeting in Boston in July of 2016, Freddy Hiebert interviewed scholars (Michael McKenna, Jan Dole, and me) about our careers in Literacy Education. This is my interview.
