Author: P. David Pearson
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MSU Reunion at LRA in Nashville…
David Pearson, Devon Brenner, Mary McVee, Gina Cervetti, and Kara Lycke—all of whom occupied the same office suite in CIERA days at MSU—got together for dinner when LRA was in Nashville.
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Book Cover for David
Kate Frankel: Some of us, mainly on the program, were challenged to make a short, pithy toast to David, preferably in the form of some creative genre. I chose the book cover and asked several colleagues to contribute back cover blurbs about David and his work. Below is the result.
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Judith Langer Remembering a Common Legacy–then and now
It has been extremely difficult for me to match specific works of mine with specific works of David’s (I have attached a few), not because he has had a limited impact on my work but because from his earliest publications and talks his work has had such a deep impact on the field, and therefore…
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The assessment of reading comprehension: A review of practices: past, present, and future. Pearson & Hamm, 2005.
During the work of the Rand Commission that redefined reading comprehension at the last run of the century, they commissioned some papers on aspects of reading comprehension, assessment among them. They asked me to do the review of the history of reading comprehension assessment. I asked Diane Hamm, then a PhD student from MSU studying…
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Skills management systems: A critique. Johnson, D. D., & Pearson, P. D. (1975)
Dale Johnson and I wrote this 1975 piece in the heyday of Skills Management Systems like Wisconsin Design and Fountain Valley, all of which managed kids’ journey through a labyrinth of sub-skill tests and practice dittoes (before photo duplication), one skill after another after another. We critiqued these early attempts for putting accountability before learning,…
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How I became a teacher
In 1963, Mary Alyce and I did the same 3 things as all our close friends. We graduated from UC Berkeley (Cal in those days), got married, and moved on to a new life—Mary Alyce as a grad student in a post-baccalaureate MA credential program at Stanford and I as a newly minted member of…
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The impact of an integrated approach to science and literacy in elementary school classrooms. Cervetti, G. N., Barber, J., Dorph, R., Pearson, P. D., & Goldschmidt, P. G. (2012)
This report of a randomized field trial also describes the conceptual bases of what we came to call, Seeds of Science–Roots of Reading, a long term project of a collaboration between the Lawrence Hall of Science and the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley.
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The state of the field: Qualitative analyses of text complexity. Pearson, P. D. & Hiebert, E. H. (2014)
This analysis of the history, prospects, and problems of qualitative approaches to gauging text complexity appeared, along with several related articles, in a special issue, edited by Freddy and me, in 2014.
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Putting text complexity in context: Refocusing on comprehension of complex text. Valencia, S. W., Wixson, K. K., & Pearson, P. D. (2014)
The Elementary School Journal, 115(2), 270-289. This is the third in a series of 3 papers that Sheila and Karen and I have written to make a case for what we call Text-Task-Scenarios–a framework that suggests that constructs like reader ability, text complexity, and reading assessment are better viewed as situated (they result from unique…