The Unmistakable Professional Promise of a Young Educational Psychology Researcher and Scholar

Abstract

This article focuses on the early research domains investigated by Michael Pressley, along with the integrations and initiatives that were inspired by them. These research domains include verbal and imagery elaboration memory strategies, and developmental aspects of them; interrogative elaboration; pictorial strategies for language and literacy skill development (including the mnemonic keyword method of vocabulary learning and pictorial strategies for remembering text information); and memory strategy monitoring and test preparation. The article is liberally sprinkled with personal accounts and anecdotes of Mike's early career experiences (as a graduate student, postgraduate researcher, and young professor). From the very beginning, there was no mistaking the professional promise of this young educational psychology researcher and scholar.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Christine McCormick, Gregory Schraw, Steve Graham, and Karen Harris for their constructive comments on an initial draft of this article.

Notes

Both Mike's wife, Donna Forrest-Pressley, and colleague/friend Chris McCormick reminded me that Mike's early face-to-face encounter with his own mortality provided him with a unique sense of urgency with respect to his professional contributions.

Chris McCormick adds, “Mike had to make friends with the security guards at Madison since he made a habit of falling asleep in the midst of that fabulous personal library that he was beginning to assemble. … Mike's library contained many volumes of poetry—right from the beginning.”

A reviewer noted that reports of the demise of behaviorism in applied and clinical psychological fields (including education) were highly exaggerated and that behavioral interventions remain in the mainstream today. Agreed, agreed. G. A. Miller's (2003) “end of behaviorism” statement refers to the fact that by the beginning of the 1960s behaviorism was not the single theoretical perspective admissible for studying psychological processes and behaviors. Before that time, psychological scientists could not talk of “learning,” “memory,” “problem solving,” and the like in the absence of formal behavioral S – (m) – R terminology, and any serious scholar who used the term thinking in a scholarly presentation might figuratively be burned at the stake.

In that Bill Rohwer was an academic father to me, genealogically he should be regarded as an influential academic grandfather of Mike's. In addition, Allan Paivio, who is widely recognized as the most prominent theorist with respect to the role of visual imagery in human cognition (e.g., Paivio, 1986), had a profound influence on Mike's blossoming academic career as both a colleague of and father to him during Mike's 11 years as a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario (1979–1989).

This elaboration truism can be similarly applied to augment George Miller's (1956) classic human rote-memory capacity claim of 7 ± 2 units.

Correct word pronunciation, spelling, and other word characteristics may also be important to acquire, but they are not considered here. Surprisingly, in his article R. C. Atkinson (1975) selects eye, a nonprominent and nonobvious feature of caballo, as its keyword.

It is interesting to note that the strategies that Mike investigated and espoused early in his career did not reflect the “balance” that became his signature reading-instruction contribution later.

This activity-based research rationale grew out of Piaget and Inhelder's (1971) discussion of “static” and “anticipatory” imagery development. Our findings are largely supported by analogous work stimulated by contemporary embodiment theory and predictions (e.g., Glenberg, 1997; Glenberg, Gutierrez, Levin, Japuntich, & Kaschak, 2004; Marley, Levin, & Glenberg, 2007).