Ann L. Brown; Theorist on How Students Learn

Ann L. Brown, an educational theorist at UC Berkeley widely respected for her research on how students learn, died June 4 in San Francisco.

She was 56 and died at the University of California Medical Center after a brief illness.

Born in an air raid shelter in Portsmouth, England, during World War II, Brown was dyslexic and did not learn to read until she was 13. Just before entering the University of London, she saw a documentary about how animals learn in their natural environments and decided to major in psychology.

Later in her academic career, she devoted her research to devising methods that she believed made learning more natural and engaging for children than the traditional rote and repetition methods.

In 1984, with University of Michigan professor Annemarie Palincsar, she developed a strategy called reciprocal teaching, which is based on the idea that students learn more effectively if they work together in small groups to help one another to read, analyze and summarize material.

2 An educational progressive, Brown often said her goal was to create communities of learners.

“We aim to produce a breed of intelligent novices,” Brown wrote in a 1993 anthology, “students who, although they may not possess the background knowledge needed in a new field, know how to go about gaining it.”

She was unusual among educational researchers, who often are criticized for rarely venturing into schools to test their theories. Brown not only used her findings to redesign curriculum and teaching methods but invited the collaboration of “field practitioners”-- teachers and principals in the trenches of public education--through a Bay Area program called Fostering Communities of Learning. She ran the program in close collaboration with her husband, UC Berkeley education professor Joseph C. Campione.

Brown was compiling the results of the program involving 400 elementary students in Oakland and Alameda when she died. Some preliminary findings show that students trained in reciprocal teaching techniques made major gains in reading comprehension. Nine- to 10-year-olds dramatically improved their abilities to make inferences and summarize the gist of a reading passage, doubling or tripling their scores on tests, according to a 1997 paper by Brown published in American Psychologist.

Noted Harvard University psychologist Howard Gardner called Brown’s work unparalleled in the degree to which she used her theories to redesign classes and said she was having “more impact than any other psychologist of her time.”

“She has taken ordinary kids, often disadvantaged, and shown that they can think, that they can be miniature scholars, doing the kinds of things scientists do,” Gardner told Education Week in 1994.

Brown’s contributions to education research have been recognized by the American Educational Research Assn., which honored her with a lifetime achievement award in 1991 when she was 48, and the American Psychological Assn.

Brown is survived by her husband; son, Richard; a granddaughter and two brothers.

A scholarship fund has been established in her honor. Contributions may be sent to the Brown/Campione Teacher Research Fund, c/o Michael D. Reynolds, executive director, Chabot Observatory and Science Center, 10902 Skyline Blvd., Oakland, CA 94619.