Marie clay research
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Clay, Marie M. 1926-2007 (Marie Mildred Clay)
OBITUARY NOTICE—
See index for CA sketch: Born January 3, 1926, in Wellington, New Zealand; died April 13, 2007, in Auckland, New Zealand. Psychologist, educator, and author. Clay developed the Reading Recovery program, which is used worldwide to bring first graders with little or no reading skills up to their grade level of literacy. She earned her teaching degree at the Wellington College of Education in 1945; Clay next attended Victoria University of Wellington, where she completed a B.A. in 1947 and an M.A. in 1949. Her master's thesis was about teaching special-needs children how to read. Clay was a teacher in her native Wellington during the late 1940s, as well as a school psychologist in Wellington. Winning a Fulbright scholarship in 1950, she studied child psychology at the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Welfare. Returning to teaching and school psychology back in New Zealand, she worked in Auckland and Wanganui during the 1950s. In 1960, she joined the faculty at the University of Auckland as a lecturer, bec
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About Marie Clay
Acknowledgement: This brief biography is adapted from the 1999 book, Stirring the Waters: The Influence of Marie Clay, edited by Janet S. Gaffney and Billie Askew. It is presented here with permission of Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH and the authors. The piece that appears on this website has been updated in a few places from text that appears in the original book.
By Janet S. Gaffney and Billie Askew
Writing a tribute to Marie Clay is simultaneously an easy and an awesome task for exactly the same reason: She has accomplished so much, and her publications reflect the continuing change of her theoretical analyses between 1967 and 2001. That her influence transcends a single field of study and spans geographic borders is reflected in a single volume entitled Stirring the Waters from which this biographical snapshot is taken.
Born in 1926 in Wellington, the capital city on the southern tip of the North Island, Clay is uniquely New Zealand — frugal and resourceful. Although education is a top priority in New Zealand, funding for schools and research leaves no room
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Marie Clay & the History of Reading Recovery
Reading Recovery is an extraordinarily long-lived and successful innovation. The story begins in 1946 when Marie Clay began graduate studies for a Master of Education in Wellington NZ and ends with the development of the early literacy intervention in the late 1970’s.
Marie Clay’s research revealed that the typical students identified as requiring extra literacy classes in 1947 were 10 years old. These children had experienced 5 years of failure in mainstream classes and still had a further 5 years of compulsory schooling.
She also found that there was meagre support for struggling readers and a lack of resources.
Marie Clay sought to find ways to prevent difficulties from occurring.
She realised the need to be able to observe and record early acquisition of reading development and developed the Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement.
This led to the development of Reading Recovery to cater for children who failed to make good progress for different reasons.
Reading Recovery has been responsive to the changes in
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