EdSight

Michael Pressley was born in 1951 and dedicated his professional life to bridging cognitive-developmental science and educational practice in the elementary classroom. As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, where he majored in psychology, he completed a thesis investigating the memory strategies used by elementary school students — an early indicator of the research trajectory that would define his career. Influenced by Benton Underwood and Donald Campbell's standards of careful, rigorous empirical work, and encouraged by James W. Hall and Rita Jeremy to pursue graduate study, he entered the doctoral programme in child psychology at the University of Minnesota in 1973, where he studied cognitive development under John Flavell — the pioneer of research on children's metacognitive development — and where his thinking on strategy use was further shaped by Bill Rohwer and Joel Levin, with whom he formed a longstanding collaboration on the role of imagery and other strategies in memory and text comprehension. He completed his PhD and began the career at the intersection of developmental psychology and educational research that would take him through appointments at the University of Maryland, the University of Albany, the University of Notre Dame (where he served for six years as academic director of the Alliance for Catholic Education programme, preparing and mentoring preservice teachers for under-resourced Catholic schools), and Michigan State University, where he was named Distinguished Professor and directed the Doctoral Programme in Teacher Education and the Literacy Achievement Research Centre. Over his career he published more than 350 research articles and book chapters, authored 14 books, and edited 19 more; edited three high-impact journals including the Journal of Educational Psychology; won eight major awards from the American Educational Research Association (Sylvia Scribner Award), the American Psychological Association (Thorndike Award), and the National Reading Conference (Oscar Causey Award); and graduated 16 doctoral students while co-publishing with over 100 students and working with hundreds of classroom teachers in his research. At the time of his death from cancer in May 2006, his research was listed in the top 1% of cited studies in his field.

Pressley's earliest and most theoretically foundational contribution was his development, through collaboration with John Borkowski, Wolfgang Schneider, Liz Ghatala, and Joel Levin, of the Good Strategy User model — a framework for understanding how effective learners develop and coordinate metacognitive knowledge, strategy selection, and motivational beliefs to regulate their own learning across contexts. Drawing on Flavell's research on metacognition and on his own extensive work on mnemonic and comprehension strategies, Pressley proposed that effective strategy use involves not merely knowing a strategy but knowing when and why to use it, monitoring its effectiveness, and adjusting one's approach in response to evidence of success or failure. His major review of the self-regulation literature (1979) and the subsequent articulation of the Good Strategy User model (1986; Pressley et al., 1987) established a framework for understanding self-regulated learning that remained influential in educational psychology for decades and positioned him well for his subsequent research on reading comprehension and effective instruction.

Pressley's most widely applied practical contribution was the development and validation of transactional strategies instruction (TSI) — a form of explicit comprehension strategies instruction that teaches students to make predictions, reflect on their reading, form mental images, summarise, and ask questions as they read, and that does so through sustained, collaborative, discussion-based engagement with texts rather than isolated skill drills. Working with Irene Gaskins at Benchmark School — a private school outside Philadelphia dedicated to evidence-based instruction for struggling readers — and with colleagues at the University of Maryland and the University of Albany, Pressley demonstrated across multiple studies that TSI significantly improved reading comprehension for low-achieving readers, and that its effects were sustained over time. His book Reading Instruction That Works: The Case for Balanced Teaching (1998) synthesised the research base for these approaches and became one of the most influential practical guides to elementary reading instruction of its generation, providing research-grounded guidance on word recognition, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension strategies within an integrated, balanced instructional framework.

One of Pressley's most distinctive methodological and substantive contributions was his sustained programme of national research into what highly effective first-grade literacy teachers actually do — a programme that began at the University of Albany in the mid-1990s and continued through his time at Notre Dame and Michigan State. Rather than focusing on what struggling readers and teachers lack — the dominant research frame in literacy education at the time — Pressley took the expert-model approach of studying the very best teachers and asking what distinguished their classrooms from others. Across multiple national studies, Pressley and his colleagues found that outstanding first-grade teachers were masterful classroom managers; created positive, high-expectations learning environments; connected all aspects of literacy instruction with each other and with content learning; scaffolded students in their zone of proximal development; and delivered instruction that was exceptionally well balanced between explicit, research-based skills instruction and extensive opportunities for students to interact with authentic texts. Their students consistently achieved at higher levels than peers in less effective classrooms, and the pattern held across diverse school settings.

Extending his teacher-level research to the school level, Pressley and his colleagues conducted in-depth case studies of three schools with extraordinary literacy achievement records: Benchmark School (a private school for struggling readers near Philadelphia), Bennett Woods (a public elementary school in suburban Michigan), and Providence St. Mel (a Catholic school in urban Chicago). These studies revealed that highly effective schools combined strong instructional leadership — principals who were visible in classrooms, provided professional development, and pushed research-based curricula — with a school-wide culture of high expectations, teacher support, and investment by all stakeholders, including administrators, teachers, parents, and students themselves, in student academic success. Pressley's theory of effective instruction, developed from these school-level studies, identified the systemic conditions under which the individual teacher practices he had documented in his classroom research could be sustained and extended across an entire school community.

Throughout the final years of his career, Pressley became an increasingly forceful critic of what he regarded as an oversimplification in both the research literature and federal education policy: the “simple view of reading,” which characterised reading as primarily a matter of decoding plus language comprehension, and which, in his view, failed to capture “the massively complex and flexible nature of skilled reading.” Drawing on his extensive research on expert readers' reading processes (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995), he argued for more comprehensive models of reading that could account for the motivational, contextual, and metacognitive dimensions of skilled reading and better guide instruction for all readers, including those who struggled. He also challenged the federal government's approach to reading research and policy, arguing in a high-profile Harvard Educational Review article (2004) that the government's insistence on a narrow, experimental-methods-only standard for what counted as scientifically based reading instruction was producing an impoverished evidence base that misrepresented what was actually known about effective reading instruction. In the research address he delivered to the International Reading Association in April 2006 — what proved to be his final major public lecture — he laid out a national reading research agenda that called for a richer, more comprehensive understanding of reading processes, more research on fluency and children's literature, and more work on how to transform ordinary classrooms and schools into the kinds of effective learning environments his career of research had documented.

• Pressley, G. M. (1976). Mental imagery helps eight-year-olds remember what they read. Journal of Educational Psychology, 68, 355–359.
• Pressley, M. (1986). The relevance of the good strategy user model to the teaching of mathematics. Educational Psychologist, 21, 139–161.
• Pressley, M. (1994). State-of-the-science primary-grades reading instruction or whole language? Educational Psychologist, 29(4), 211–215.
• Pressley, M., & Afflerbach, P. (1995). Verbal protocols of reading: The nature of constructively responsive reading. Erlbaum.
• Pressley, M. (1998). Reading instruction that works: The case for balanced teaching. Guilford Press.
• Pressley, M. (Ed.). (2003). Motivating primary-grades students. Guilford Press.
• Pressley, M., Allington, R. L., Wharton-McDonald, R., Block, C. C., & Morrow, L. M. (2001). Learning to read: Lessons from exemplary first-grade classrooms. Guilford Press.
• Pressley, M., Borkowski, J. G., & Schneider, W. (1987). Cognitive strategies: Good strategy users coordinate metacognition and knowledge. Annals of Child Development, 4, 89–129.
• Pressley, M., Duke, N. K., & Boling, E. C. (2004). The educational science and scientifically-based instruction we need: Lessons from reading research and policy making. Harvard Educational Review, 74, 30–61.