John Downing.

About John Downing

John Downing (1922–1987) was a British educational psychologist who started his career as a teacher then worked as an academic from 1960 until his death in 1987. He published over 300 academic papers in his 27-year academic career, specialising in both how children read and how they learn to read. His three main fields of study were the initial teaching alphabet, the psychology of reading and the comparison of reading methods across different languages and cultures. His principle works in each of these fields were Evaluating the Initial Teaching Alphabet, Reading & Reasoning and Comparative Reading. Fundamentally, Downing was an educational psychologist and his main lifetime achievement was the formulation of the cognitive clarity theory of learning to read.