We were invited to contribute to this volume on science and literacy instruction in light of the NGSS based on an earlier Science (2010) article by Pearson, Moje, and Greenleaf. This piece was an opportunity to find connections among our various projects on literacy in science, which had been developed for students at different grade levels and guided by different principles and goals.… Read the rest
Category: The Nature of Comprehension
Tierney, R. J. & Pearson, P. D. Learning to learn from text. (1981)
Rob and I wrote this piece in 1981 for the first edition of Dishner, Readence, & Bean’s Reading in the Content Area: Improving Classroom Instruction. In the second edition in 1992, it was reprinted with a “revisionist essay” telling what we would change about it 11 years later.… Read the rest
From what is reading to what is literacy. Frankel, K.K., Becker, B.L.C., Rowe, M.W., & Pearson, P.D. (2016)
This piece appeared along with several other pieces in a retrospective examination of the 1985 publication, Becoming a Nation of Readers by the Center for the Study of Reading in Boston University’s Journal of Education. Many of the authors of the retrospective also participated in a symposium at the Literacy Research Association just after its publication.… Read the rest
Theory and Practice in Reading Comprehension: Reflections on a Half Century of Work
A schema-theoretic view of basic processes in reading comprehension. Anderson, R. C., & Pearson, P. D. (1984)
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
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