ABSTRACT
Marie M. Clay was a clinical child psychologist who chose to study young learners during the initial, formative years of literacy acquisition. Applying the perspectives and practices of developmental psychology, Clay's sought to document behavioral changes in children's literacy development by capturing performance in reading and writing tasks collected over time. Clay's initial work was motivated by questions resulting from the correlations found between learners' literacy performance in the first year of school and their rankings among peers in subsequent years. Clay's literacy processing theory, a theory of assembling a complex network of perceptual and cognitive working systems for reading or writing continuous texts, is based on her observational research. Clay began her quest to document change in observable literacy behaviors with an atheoretical, no-hypothesis stance to data collection. Clay's methodology deviated from prevalent approaches that tended to quantify the effects of instruction by examining learners' pre- and postinstructional performance.
