I was asked by the RAND Commission to write a white paper on the history of reading comprehension assessment. Building on the seminal work of Peter Johnston for the first Handbook of Reading Research, this is the result. Time for an update!… Read the rest
Keep Your Eye On The Flag
I entered the profession in 1964 during another period, not unlike several more recent cycles, in which we were so desperate for teachers that states would credential folks on a provisional basis if (a) they had a degree in anything and (b) were breathing.… Read the rest
On becoming a thoughtful reader: Learning to read like a writer. Pearson, P. D. & Tierney, R. J. (1984)
Rob and I wrote this essay for an NSSE volume on secondary literacy edited by Olive Niles and Alan Purves. We used it as an opportunity to take the “constructivist notion of reading comprehension to the nth degree by positing that every act of comprehension is an act of composing.… Read the rest
Toward a Composing Model of Reading—Tierney, R. J. & Pearson, P. D. (1983)
This is the first published appearance of what came to be called our composing model of reading in which we made the argument that readers, like writers, engaged in an original act of “composing” a text for an inner reader and, in the process, made all of the inferences necessary to create a considerate and complete situation model of the meaning of the text.… Read the rest
Children’s Comprehension of Between- and Within-Sentence Syntactic Structures—Bormuth, J. R., Manning, J., Carr, J., & Pearson, D. (1970)
This is my first published piece. Completed while I was in grad school at the U of Minnesota. John Bormuth spent two years there on his way from UCLA to U of Chicago. The idea was to develop, eventually, a systematic way of teaching intersentential syntax.… Read the rest
Learning to Read… in first grade at Pleasant Prairie Grammar School
I went to a one room schoolhouse in the wide-open spaces of the Sacramento Valley in post-World War II California. In 1947, when I started first grade, all 42 of us-from first graders through eighth graders were taught by Mrs. Millsap, a matronly lady in her early sixties who was driven daily to and from the school by a retired Mr.… Read the rest
The Metcalf Project: A Teacher-Researcher Collaboration—Tierney, R. J., Tucker, D. L., Gallagher, M., Pearson, P. D., & Crismore, A. (1988)
This chapter summarizes a multi-year effort to examine the efficacy of teacher research as a model of teacher learning and professional development.… Read the rest
Toward a Theory of Reading Comprehension Instruction
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
Where the P in “P David” comes from
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
1979 UIUC—PDP & Colleagues Play Basketball
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.