David Richard Olson (born June 16, 1935) is a Canadian cognitive developmental psychologist who has studied the development of language, literacy, and cognition, particularly the mental lives of children, their understanding of language and mind and the psychology of teaching. Olson is University Professor Emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, where he has taught since 1966.
Biography
Olson was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and was raised by his grandparents until the age of 6, as his mother had contracted tuberculosis. He attended the University of Saskatchewan from 1953–55, obtained a teaching certificate; he then taught in a village school in Alsask, Saskatchewan. He returned to the University of Saskatchewan, where he graduated with a B.Ed. in 1960. He went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 1963. He worked briefly at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and was worked as a fellow under the supervision of Jerome Bruner, at Harvard University's Center for Cognitive Studies
Olson moved to Toronto in 1966 and has taught there ever since. He is recognized as a world authority on the psychological implications of literacy, a topic on which he has published widely and lectured around the world. He is cross-appointed to University College, Toronto and the University of Toronto. Olson is married and has five children.
Cognitive developmental psychology
Under Bruner's sponsorship, Olson explored young children’s mental representations of space, particularly how children's language influenced their ability to reconstruct spatial patterns. He found that while children had no difficulty reconstructing horizontal and vertical patterns, they had great difficulties with diagonals before they went to school. It seems that to succeed in conceptualizing a diagonal, it has to be reconceived in terms of relations between horizontal and vertical axes. This research led to his first book, Spatial Cognition: The Child's Acquisition of Diagonality. (Erlbaum, 1970)
The "say-mean" distinction and the Theory of Mind
In the 1970s, Olson began a research program on children's understanding of language and meaning, advancing the claim that young children fail to make a distinction between what is "said" and what is "meant." This led to a program of research on children's awareness of language and their understanding of mind. Along with Janet Astington, Alison Gopnik, and Lynd Forguson, Olson conducted pioneering work on the origins of the concept of belief and intention that led to the publication of the volume "Developing Theories of Mind" (Edited by Astington, Harris, and Olson), (CUP, 1988). See Astington, 2000 for an account of research in this period.
The cognitive implications of literacy
Psychologists had traditionally seen writing as a tool for making speech transportable through space and time, a simple cipher for representing speech. Consequently, learning to read and write was seen as acquiring a skill for translating sounds into written signs. The accepted pedagogy was that of repetition and training. Olson's work, along with that of Emilia Ferreiro and others, has helped to shift the understanding of reading and writing acquisition from skills to be acquired into concepts to be understood.