Marion Blank

Last updated

Marion Blank is a developmental psychologist, the creator of the Reading Kingdom program, the creator and former director of the A Light on Literacy program at Columbia University in New York. [1] She also created Comprendi, a reading system developed for the purposes of increasing reading comprehension. As a developmental psychologist, she has specializes in language and learning.

Blank has also developed a model for teaching reading that is based on six critical skills. Two of the skills are defined as physical skills: visual sequencing and fine motor performance, which are for reading and writing respectively. The other four are language skills: phonolohy, semantics, syntax, and discourse. The model was developed for the purposes of being able to be taught to a wide variety of children, including those for whom reading attainment is highly problematic, such as non-verbal autistic children. [2]

Her books titled The Reading Remedy, Spectacular Bond, and her 2010 reading program, Reading Kingdom, were written in the purposes of being able to make the reading system she developed more accessible to parents to prevent reading failure.

Education

Blank has received a bachelor's degree and a masters in education from the City University of New York. She has a Masters of Public Health degree from Columbia University. [3] She has also completed her Ph.D. in Medical Psychology from the University of Cambridge. [4]

Career

Blank served on the faculty of the Department of Child Psychiatry at Columbia University where she created the A Light on Literacy program. She is also a licensed psychologist. She also spends her time producing books, articles, software programs and tests (such as the Preschool Language Assessment Instrument, published in both English and Spanish, which is a test designed to assess the verbal communication skills of children in the preschool years).

From 1973 to 1983, Blank was a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Rutgers Medical School (a component institution of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey). [3] In that capacity, she served as the director of a research unit in reading disabilities. From 1960 to 1973, she was on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York where her work included serving as the Director of the teaching program of the interdisciplinary Training Program.

In 2021, Blank was CEO of Marion's Learning Lab. [5] In that capacity, she developed a new on-line system to improve reading comprehension, called Comprendi. The launch edition of Comprendi was planned to be used in over 50 classrooms in the fall of 2023, with full-scale subscription-based use planned for January 2024.[ citation needed ]

Publications

Blank’s books include; [6]

Awards and recognition

In 2010 Blank received the Upton Sinclair Award, [3] which honors individuals who have made a significant contribution to education while displaying great courage in the process. Her software reading program, Sentence Master, received the Special Education Software Award from the Software Publishers Association and a Certificate of Achievement in the Johns Hopkins University National Search. She has been the recipient of a U.S. Public Health Service Career Development Award, an Award of Commendation from the New Jersey Speech and Hearing Association and the Elwyn Morey Memorial Lectureship in Australia. In 1996, she was the National Tour Lecturer for the Australian Speech/Language Association. She was the 1994 and 1995 New Jersey nominee for the Frank R. Kleffner Clinical Career Award of the American Speech-Language Hearing Association.

In addition, she is a member and fellow of the American Psychological Association, and a member of the Association of Children with Learning Disabilities. She has served on the editorial boards of a number of journals concerned with the issues of language and learning (e.g., Child Development, Applied Psycho- linguistics, Child Development and Care) as well as the boards of numerous committees including the William T. Grant Foundation and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

References

  1. ↑ "Marion Blank". IHome School Network. Retrieved April 28, 2025.
  2. ↑ "For Kids with Autism, Learning to Talk Starts with Reading". Columbia Medicine Magazine. 3 May 2013. Retrieved 7 December 2021.
  3. 1 2 3 "Dr Marion Blank". Huffington Post. Retrieved April 28, 2025.
  4. ↑ "Dr Marion Blank". Questions for Living. Retrieved April 28, 2025.
  5. ↑ "Dr. Marion's Learning Lab". Dr. Marion's Learning Lab. Retrieved 2024-10-06.
  6. ↑ "Marion Blank". Goodreads. Retrieved April 28, 2025.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.