Her realization that children's learning difficulties often stem from an inability to use metacognitive strategies such as summarizing led to profound advances in educational psychology theory and teaching practices.
Brown received a PhD in psychology from the University of London for research on "Anxiety and Complex Learning Performance in Children."
[1] Brown was also instrumental in the development of the method of reciprocal teaching, in which teachers and students take turns leading structured discussions of text.
Fostering Community of Learners (FCL) was a program launched by Brown along with her husband Joseph Campione at the University of California, Berkeley.
[2] Brown and Campione assure that while the approaches to the FCL project are similar to Dewey's early works, there are also differences.
According to Brown and Campione, discovery learning that was unguided could potentially be dangerous, while didactic study led to passive learners.
The project also utilized reciprocal teaching, which allowed students to study and share their expertise with a group and discuss material they have prepared themselves.
Research conducted in a laboratory allowed a better understanding of the developmental patterns demonstrated by children and in turn gave rise to classroom observations in which hypotheses could be systematically explore in relatively controlled environments.