Robert Slavin, Who Studied How Children Learn, Dies at 70
He favored phonics to teach reading and grouping students with different aptitudes rather than by age or grade.
The education professor Robert Slavin in an undated photo. He was an early proponent of cooperative learning, an approach through which small teams of students with different academic abilities worked together. Credit.Will Kirk/Johns Hopkins University
May 11, 2021
Robert E. Slavin, a sociologist whose rigorous research into how children learn helped shift the emphasis in classrooms across the country toward teaching reading through phonics, mixing students of different aptitudes rather than educating them on separate tracks, and testing them for vision and other factors that could affect their education, died on April 24 in Baltimore. He was 70.
In the late 1980s, he and his wife developed the popular reading program Success for All. He recently promoted a tutoring initiative to help students forced from school by the coronavirus.