P. David Pearson
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P. David Pearson (born 1941) is an American reading and literacy scholar. He is a professor emeritus in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as Dean from 2001 to 2010.[1] He was elected to National Academy of Education in 2003 and received the Alan Purves Award from the National Council of Teachers of English in 2004.[2] His work focuses on reading comprehension, reading assessment[3] and the historical and policy dimensions of literacy education.[4]
Pearson was born in Oroville, California, the youngest of six children. He attended multiple elementary schools in the Sacramento and Sonoma Valleys before completing high school at Healdsburg High School in the Sonoma Valley.[5] He earned his Bachelor of Arts in history with distinction and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963,[6] after which he taught fifth grade in multilingual classrooms in Porterville, California, Pearson then entered the doctoral program in reading education at the University of Minnesota, where he received his Ph.D. in 1969.[5]
He completed post‑doctoral appointment at the University of Texas at Austin in 1970 and additional post‑doctoral work at Stanford University in 1976.[7]
Career
Pearson began his academic career at the University of Minnesota from 1970 to 1978,[8] after which he held appointments at the University of Illinois at Urbana‑Champaign from 1978 to 1995,[6] Michigan State University from 1995 to 2001,[9] and the University of California, Berkeley from 2001 to 2021. At Berkeley, he served as Dean of the Graduate School of Education from 2001 to 2010.[10]
He also held endowed positions including the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of Education at Michigan State and both the Corey Chair in Instructional Science and the Corey Emeritus Chair at UC Berkeley.[5]
He has served on the boards of the International Literacy Association (ILA) and the Association of Colleges of Teacher Education.[11] He served as president of the National Reading Conference (now Literacy Research Association) and the National Conference of Research in English.[1]
He served as editor of Reading Research Quarterly,[12] the NRC Yearbook,[9] and Review of Research in Education, and has sat on editorial boards of Journal of Educational Psychology and Journal of Literacy Research.[7]
In 2012, the Literacy Research Association established the P. David Pearson Scholarly Influence Award in his honor.[5]