1997 James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award

Ann L. Brown

University of California, Berkeley

Ann Brown is presented with the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award for brilliantly combining the fields of developmental psychology, learning theory, and the design of learning environments in a career of theoretical and experimental work and their applications to education.

Her seminal experimental studies on memory in children helped define the concept of metamemory as an important process of cognition. Her ingenious studies of analogical transfer renewed our understanding of children’s capabilities for generalizing their learning. This work is fundamental to her outstanding studies of the relationship between children’s problem-solving strategies and self-regulation in learning that led to a widely adopted program on text comprehension called “Reciprocal Teaching.” Her application of social learning theory to a research program on communities of learners has been an overarching contribution to the interaction between the refinement of theory, the elaboration of cognitive processes and the design of environments for studying teaching and school learning.