Richard Durán is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Education. Most of his research interests centered on literacy and learning of persons from varied language and cultural backgrounds, but they are not confined solely to learning in school settings. After obtaining his Ph.D. in Psychology in 1977 he worked at Educational Testing Service in Princeton conducting investigations and publishing research findings on the validity of the SAT, GRE, and TOEFL tests. This work benefited from his graduate training in quantitative and cognitive psychology. One of the main findings of this research was that SAT test scores predict early college grades less accurately for Latino students as compared to other students, but that there was clear evidence of poor schooling preparation of Latino students. Yet despite the latter evidence, Duran was not convinced that students’ true learning potential was assessed adequately by standardized tests. As a result he developed a strong interest in how more effective instruction could be designed to assist academic outcomes for culturally and linguistically diverse students who don’t perform well on standardized tests and who come from low-income families. Enter social constructionism and cultural psychology as new fields for his research.
Durán joined the GSE faculty in 1984, and his research program investigated learning and culture itself as socially constructed. This work was heavily influenced by the emergence of cultural psychology as a field drawing on the work of the cultural historical or Vygotskian views of cognitive development and activity theory. His research teams have investigated how classroom interaction leads to the construction of learning expertise, how teachers design and implement constructivist learning activities for students, and how students’ self-awareness of their performance leads to new notions of assessment. This research was funded by the Center for Research on Education Standards and Testing, and the Center for Research on Education of Students Placed At-Risk.
While his team pursued research in classrooms, it realized the value of a more ecologically complex approach to improving educational outcomes. In collaboration with Professor Emeritus Betsy Brenner he and his team pursued research on children’s learning in after-school computer club settings with support from the UC LINKS after-school computer club network. Separately, the Mellon Foundation also supported his research on new models of literacy achievement arising through children' s computer club participation. Another strand of research involved working with the immigrant parents of students to help them acquire knowledge of how to use computers and how to work with their children on research and publication projects. This latter research was supported by the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence. Concern for electronic technology and its facilitation of learning as a social process served as a unifying theme across his research projects.