Toward a Theory of Reading Comprehension Instruction—Pearson, P. D. & Spiro, R. (1980)

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.  I’ll also post the version of this piece that Instructor magazine created to translate these ideas into prose that would speak to practitioners.