Karen Scheid

I had an opportunity to write Helping Students Become Strategic Learners following my involvement in a four-year federally funded project aimed at identifying effective instructional strategies for K-12 students with learning challenges. That project sponsored annual convenings of researchers, practitioners and educational publishers to focus attention on specifice instructional interventions that had proven to improve educational outcomes of students. The late Michael Pressley was a participant in two of those meetings. Michael, who at that time was a professor at the University of Maryland, was in the process of producing a series of publications focusing on cognitive learning strategies research. He thought the work that I had produced for the project would be particularly helpful for teachers, and he asked me to compile it for publication as a part of his series, which of course I was honored to do.

Since may involvement with that project my professional work has focused primarily on adult basic and literacy education. I served for eleven years as the executive director of the Ohio Literacy Network and for the past eight years as a consultant with the Ohio Adult Basic and Literacy Education program, which is currently housed at the Ohio Board of Regents. In both of these positions I have continued to be involved in federal initiatives such as Bridges to Practice, STAR and Learning to Achieve that rely heavily on the research on learning strategies and effective instruction that was emerging back in the 1980's.

Karen Scheid, Ph.D.