Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar appointed Ann L. Brown Distinguished University Professor

Established in 1947, Distinguished University Professorships are the university’s most prestigious professorships. The Regents established the professorships to recognize senior faculty with exceptional scholarly and/or creative achievements, national and international reputations for academic excellence, and superior records of teaching, mentoring, and service. 

In collaboration with the dean of his or her school or college, recipients name the professorship to honor an accomplished scholar in their field. With this professorship, Palincsar honors her mentor Ann L. Brown (1943–1999), who was an educational psychologist responsible for developing methods for teaching children to be better learners. Her realization that children's learning difficulties often stem from an inability to use metacognitive strategies such as summarizing led to profound advances in educational psychology theory and teaching practices.

Palincsar’s scholarship has transformed the field of cognition, learning, and instruction by developing a preeminent program of research based on the belief that the purpose of education is to facilitate children’s ability to think, reason, problem solve, and transfer learning to novel situations. 

In the 1980s, Palincsar launched one of the most successful literacy instructional interventions to date. Called Reciprocal Teaching (RT), the intervention engages students and their teachers in co-constructing the meanings of shared texts through dialogue. Her seminal work documenting the effectiveness of RT has since inspired many researchers to replicate the results across a variety of instructional contexts and has gained a wide practitioner audience of reading educators. RT is one of the few interventions indexed as highly successful in the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse. 

Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, she has conducted research at the intersection of the language literacies and science by collaborating with disciplinary experts across domains. Her work on interdisciplinary instruction has identified implications for designing communities of practice among teachers, designing and using of science text to promote scientific reasoning and knowledge building, and enacting the discipline-specific nature of dialogic instruction. 

Her work has significantly influenced the field’s understanding of learning theory, especially through her writing about sociocultural and social constructivist theories of learning.  Specifically, her research offers pathways for restoring opportunity in today’s schools and classrooms by equipping teachers with the necessary skills to initiate and sustain high-quality dialogue in diverse classrooms.

The professorship also recognizes her record of service to the profession, university, and community. Within just the past ten years Palincsar, who currently serves as the chair of the Educational Studies program and has previously served as associate dean of graduate affairs and associate dean of academic affairs, has mentored more than 40 doctoral students as a chair, co-chair, or committee member, and mentors between three and five master’s level students per year. She also serves as a mentor for teaching apprentices in which she works with them to develop lesson plans, convey efficacious teaching practices, and provide continuous feedback on their teaching. 

Palincsar has achieved top distinctions in both the education and literacy fields. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and is an American Educational Research Association (AERA) Fellow. She was elected to the Reading Hall of Fame in 2017, and she received the P. David Pearson Scholarly Influence Award in 2019 for her contributions to advancing literacy research and instruction.  

In addition to her elected membership to the National Academy of Education and her American Educational Research Association (AERA) Fellowship, she is a leader within these esteemed bodies. She is an executive board member for the National Academy of Education and a member of the professional development committee.  She has served on three of the National Academy of Science’s Research Councils: the Prevention of Reading Difficulty in Young Children; the Panel on Teacher Preparation; and the Committee on the Science and Practice of Learning (where she was one of only three education scholars). In AERA, she has served as a member of the executive council and as program chair and has chaired several divisions of the organization.  She also serves on the International Reading Association’s Literacy Research Panel, on the National Advisory Board to Children's Television Workshop, the International Reading Association’s Literacy Research Panel, and as a member of the Contributions to Research Award committee the National Association for Research on Science Teaching.