Educational Psychology Re v iew,Vol.12,No.1,2000Conversations with Three Highly Productive Educational Psychologists:Richard Anderson, Richard Mayer,and Michael PressleyKenneth A.Kiewra1,2and John W.Creswell1This article seeks to answer the question,‘‘What factors characterize highly producti v e educational psychologists?’’Using qualitati v e research methods, we identified three top scholars in educational psychology—Richard Ander-son,Richard Mayer,and Michael Pressley—and examined factors that influ-ence their work.Although each scholar had a distincti v e trademark character-istic,they had much in common.Each had an impressi v e lineage,gra v itated to centers of excellence,was guided by routine,contributed significantly to educational ser v ice,pursued outside interests,stri v ed for clarity in writing, collaborated hea v ily and effecti v ely with students,and shared the same guid-ing philosophy regarding scholarly producti v ity.The article concludes with ad v ice to budding educational psychologists and with unanswered questions that perhaps merit further research.KEY WORDS:educational psychology;expertise;scholarly productivity.INTRODUCTIONSuppose you are serving on your department’s annual evaluation com-mittee and one of your colleagues submits materials detailing the year’s accomplishments listed below?1Department of Educational Psychology,University of Nebraska—Lincoln,Lincoln,Ne-braska.2Correspondence should be directed to Kenneth Kiewra,Department of Educational Psychol-ogy,Bancroft Hall,University of Nebraska,Lincoln,Nebraska68588-0345.1351040-726X/00/0300-0135$18.00/0 2000Plenum Publishing Corporation136Kiewra and Creswell●Articles—18●Books—3●Edited Books—2●Journal Editor—2●Editorial Boards—9●Major Awards—2●Department ChairWhat would you think?First,you might believe your colleague was halluci-nating.After confirming he/she was lucid and had actually accomplished all of this,you wonder how these accomplishments were possible.That is what we wondered.How do highly productive educational psychologists accomplish so much?To answer this question,we interviewed three top educational psychologists.Our investigation is thefirst,to our knowledge,that examines the scholarly lives of prolific educational psychol-ogists.Certainly,productivity or expertise has been explored in various domains such as music and art(Hayes,1985),chess(Charness et al.,1996) and architecture(Dudek and Hall,1991).In addition,psychologist Howard Gardner(1993)studied the lives and works of outstanding creators from various disciplines,and educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom(1985) studied how artistic,athletic,scientific,and mathematical talent develop-ment is affected by early parental and educational influences.Expertise in the closely alignedfields of education(Beliner,1986,1988)and psychology (Lindsey,1976)have also been studied,but not in educational psychology.A second question also drove our investigation:What advice might be given to budding educational psychologists who hope to become more productive?Insights gleaned from highly productive educational psycholo-gists might help others work more productively.This article is divided into six sections:(1)how the study was completed, (2)a glimpse at their work,(3)trademark characteristics,(4)common characteristics,(5)surprising aspects,and(6)conclusions.HOW THE STUDY WAS COMPLETEDThe overall research approach was to use case analysis as the mode of qualitative inquiry.This consisted of purposefully selecting three highly productive scholars in educational psychology who were not representative of the universe of scholars,but who were individuals who could provide detailed case descriptions of prolific scholars.The case analysis approach further meant describing each scholar,identifying themes,reflecting on how these three cases were both similar and different,and posing severalHighly Productive Educational Psychologists137 naturalistic generalizations about what we learned.These procedures were consistent with good qualitative case development(Merriam,1998;Stake, 1995).The study was completed in four phases:(1)nomination process, (2)scoring,(3)data gathering,and(4)data analysis and interpretation.Nomination ProcessWe narrowed our focus to highly productive educational psychologists in the cognition and learning area(which is Division C in the American Educational Research Association).We sent letters to all113Division C members in the Midwestern Educational Research Association(MWERA) asking them to‘‘rank the names of educational psychologists working in the area of learning and cognition who you consider most successful in terms of their contributions,visibility,and influence.’’About40%of the members surveyed were men.Eighty-nine percent were employed in the midwest(e.g.,Illinois,Indiana,Kansas,Nebraska,Ohio,and Wisconsin) and11%worked outside the Midwest with the greatest numbers from New York(3)and Canada(3).A stamped,addressed card accompanied the letter.The card provided space for anonymous nominators to list the‘‘most,’’‘‘second-most,’’and ‘‘third-most’’successful educational psychologists in the learning and cogni-tion area.Forty-one(36%)of the cards were completed and returned.The return rate is acceptable given that our sampling was purposeful rather than representative.ScoringScoring was done by assigning three,two,and one point(s),respec-tively,for educational psychologists designated as‘‘first,’’‘‘second,’’and ‘‘third’’most successful.The top10educational psychologists,according to our survey,are listed alphabetically in Table I.The list of nominees does not seem to represent an association or geographic bias.Among the10nominees,only Joel Levin is an active member in the Midwestern Educational Research Association.Five of the 10have made invited addresses at MWERA conferences but so too have several other outstanding Division C scholars whose names do not appear on the list.Geographically,only Richard Anderson and Joel Levin were at Midwest institutions when the survey was done.The others were largely at institutions on the East or West Coasts.The list of nominees is biased toward men even though the majority138Kiewra and Creswell Table I.Top10Successful Educational Psychologists in Alpha-betical Order1.Richard Anderson,University of Illinois2.David Berliner,Arizona State University3.John Bransford,Vanderbilt University4.Ann Brown,Stanford University5.John Gardner,University of South Carolina6.Joel Levin,University of Wisconsin7.Richard Mayer,University of California,Santa Barbara8.Michael Pressley,University of Notre Dame a9.Robert Slavin,John Hopkins University10.Robert Sternberg,Yale Universitya Michael Pressley was at the University of Albany in New Yorkat the time of the survey and interview.of nominators were women(60%).With the exception of Ann Brown,the list of nominees is comprised solely of men.Women,were better repre-sented,however,among the pool of nominees.Seven(16%)of the44 different nominees were women.Data GatheringThe four most successful educational psychologists,as perceived by our nominators,were(in alphabetical order)Richard Anderson,Ann Brown, Richard Mayer,and Michael Pressley.We contacted each one and asked him/her to participate in our study.Pressley,Mayer,and Anderson agreed to participate,but Brown did not.The participating scholars sent us a current vita,reprints representative of their best empirical and theoretical work,and pictures and videotapes that were used in invited presentations at the Midwestern Educational Research Association(Kiewra et al.,1996) and the American Educational Research Association(Kiewra et al.,1997).Kiewra and Creswell interviewed each nominee by telephone.Each interview lasted between one and two hours.The interviews were tape recorded and transcribed.We asked general questions about their(a)schol-arly work,(b)influences,(c)time management,and(d)research manage-ment.With regard to scholarship we asked them(a)to describe their most important contributions to theory and practice,(b)to tell how their work has evolved,and(c)to outline future research plans.With regard to influ-ences,we asked about(a)personal characteristics,(b)academic ancestry, and(c)how other people,places,or things influenced them.With regard to time management,we asked them to describe(a)an average work day, (b)how they spend leisure time,and(c)strategies used or sacrifices made for increasing work time.With regard to research management,we askedHighly Productive Educational Psychologists139 Table II.Number of Books and Articles Published by the ThreeScholarsAnderson Mayer PressleyPublished books498Published articles145147203how they conduct research and how they write a manuscript.Finally,we asked them what advice they might give to a student who aspires to become a highly productive scholar and what important questions we might have failed to ask.Data Analysis and InterpretationOur analysis strategy consisted of generating detailed descriptions of each of the three prolific scholars tofirst allow an overview or a‘‘glimpse’’of the range and extent of their scholarship.We then examined our data sources to determine themes or‘‘trademark characteristics’’in the profes-sional life of each.We next used a cross-case analysis approach(Yin,1989) to identify the scholars’‘‘common characteristics’’and‘‘surprising aspects’’of their work.Finally,we drew‘‘conclusions’’about the characteristics of these three highly productive scholars.A GLIMPSE OF THEIR WORKBefore overviewing their work,we confirm that the three scholars interviewed(R.Anderson,Mayer,and Pressley)are indeed productive. Table II shows the number of books and articles each has published through 1996.Table III shows that their productivity has continued unabated.Rich-Table III.Number of Articles Published by the Three ScholarsOver Five Year PeriodsArticles published Anderson Mayer Pressley1–5years1210226–10years15284311–15years29296516–20years27336121–25years154726–30years2231–35years18140Kiewra and Creswell ard Anderson,in the pastfive years,has published about four articles per year which is the average number of articles he has published per year over his35-year career.Pressley’s and Mayer’s productivity are on the rise. Mayer has averaged nearly10articles per year in the pastfive years and six articles per year throughout his25-year career.Pressley has averaged about12articles per year in the pastfive years compared to10articles per year throughout his20-year career.Richard Anderson is professor of psychology and the Director of the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign.Anderson’s work focuses on reading.He has received approxi-mately26million dollars through grants and contracts to support reading research and practice.Anderson’s early work examined issues related to critical thinking and problem solving(Anderson,1963a,1963b,1965a),concept learning (Anderson,1965b,1966),and programmed instruction(Anderson and Faust,1967;Faust and Anderson,1967).In the early1970s,Anderson’s work shifted toward verbal learning,in general,and sentence learning,in particular(Anderson,1970,1971;Anderson et al.,1971).Later that decade, his focus shifted slightly toward the role that schema play in text learning (Anderson,1977,1978;Pichert and Anderson,1977).Since then,Anderson has investigated a wide array of theoretically and practically important reading issues such as attention(Anderson,1982),inserted questions(Rey-nolds and Anderson,1982),independent reading(Fielding,et al.,1986), text readability(Anderson and Davison,1988;Anderson et al.,1987),con-text(Nagy et al.,1987;Nagy et al.,1985),cross-cultural comparisons(Shu et al.,1995),and vocabulary acquisition(Anderson and Nagy,1992;Herman et al.,1987).Anderson’s work has influenced practice.For instance,Anderson and colleagues’s(Anderson et al.,1985)text Becoming a Nation of Readers has sold more than350,000copies.Anderson and colleagues(Anderson,Au, and Jacobs,1991)have also developed a six-part national teacher training video series on reading instruction and have published extensively on read-ing instruction practices(Anderson,Wilkenson,and Mason,1991;Gaskins et al.,1993).Richard Mayer is professor of psychology,University of California, Santa Barbara.Mayer’s chief focus is problem solving.He has examined how instructional variables such as advance organizers(Mayer,1982),repe-tition(Bromage and Mayer,1986),questions(Sagerman and Mayer,1987), note taking(Shrager and Mayer,1989),illustrations(Mayer and Gallini, 1990),and animation(Mayer and Anderson,1992)influence problem solv-ing in content areas such as science,math,and computer programming. Mayer has received over four million dollars in grant funding to supportHighly Productive Educational Psychologists141 his research.He has authored texts on problem solving(Mayer,1992), cognitive psychology(Mayer,1981),computer programming(Mayer,1980a, 1986),learning and memory(Tarpy and Mayer,1978),critical thinking (Mayer&Goodchild,1995),and educational psychology(Mayer,1987, 1999).Michael Pressley is a professor of educational psychology at the Univer-sity of Notre Dame.His research career has advanced in approximately three seven-year phases.Hisfirst phase beginning in1976investigated imagery,in particular the keyword method for vocabulary learning (Pressley,1976,1977a,1977b).His second phase,beginning in about1983, examined strategy instruction with an emphasis on metacognition as an important component of strategy instruction(Pressley et al.,1984).An important outgrowth of this phase was the‘‘Good Strategy User’’model (Pressley,1986).The third phase,beginning around1990,examined reading comprehension strategies with emphasis on transactional reading strategies (Pressley et al.,1991).Several subthemes punctuate Pressley’s work.One is a developmental theme.Much of Pressley’s work,particularly his earliest work,addresses developmental issues(Pressley and Levin,1977).A second subtheme is his investigation of students with special needs(Pressley et al.,1989).A third subtheme is Pressley’s shift from experimental to qualitative investigations. Much of Pressley’s recent work with reading instruction,for example,is anthropological in nature(Pressley,Schuder,SAIL Faculty and Adminis-tration,Bergman&El-Dinary,1992).TRADEMARK CHARACTERISTICSEach scholar exhibited a trademark characteristic instrumental in his productivity.Anderson is the‘‘enculturator,’’able to assemble and mentor teams of highly productive graduate students.Mayer is the‘‘systematizer.’’There exists remarkable order in Mayer’s research agenda and the ways he produces his work.Pressley is the‘‘interconnector.’’Every task he undertakes leads ultimately to multiple products.Richard Anderson—EnculturatorAbout75%of Anderson’s work involves collaboration with other re-searchers.Many collaborators are graduate students.Anderson has devel-oped an apprenticeship program for mentoring graduate students and con-ducting research.At any given time,Anderson directs multiple research142Kiewra and Creswell teams comprised of graduate students working on various problems.Ander-son credits his research productivity to his work with graduate students. He remarks:If you’re going to be a productive researcher you need to get your new peopleenculturated,get them motivated,and get them to understand what they’re supposedto do.It’s good for them;it keeps up the productivity of the whole research groupand the senior professor.His apprenticeship system is such that the more senior and motivated students are assigned increasingly higher leadership roles and reap more of the publication rewards.Anderson meets at least once a week with research teams and allows students to drop by his office at any time for guidance.Anderson also credits his continued zest for research to his collabora-tions with students.He says,My sense of excitement[for my work]builds when that excitement is shared bythe eager young people who together are going to do great things.It’s exciting tocome to work and bounce ideas around with these kids.I can now call them kids.I have been able to attract a stream of exceptional young people to work with.That keeps you young.That keeps you fresh.Anderson chides his students to become more than normal scientists who replicate the work of others.He pushes them to become pioneering scientists whofind and tackle new or understudied problems using the powers of observation and thinking.Below is advice given to his gradu-ate students:I feel that too many people are contributing footnotes to other people’s historyrather than making some substantial and unique—at least distinctive—contributionon their own.We do a fairly good job of training normal scientists—people whorun the101st adjunct question study,the500th feedback study,the600th study onmaps,the incremental improvement,or the additional control.We’ve gotten to thepoint of paint-by-number science.Don’t take the most popular problem of the day.Ask what is important in thegeneral area I’m working in that is poorly understood,important,but understudied,and do an analysis of that.First,think,talk,discuss,search your own feelings.If there is something you canwatch or do,do that before you go out and read everything written on the subject.All graduate training pushes you in quite the other direction.We have becomeexperts at reading the ideas and research of others.Richard Mayer—SystematizerThere is a system governing the work Mayer does and how he does it.Mayer’s research agenda is highly programmatic.Figure1shows many of the variables Mayer’s work addresses.Driving Mayer’s research is hisHighly Productive Educational Psychologists143Fig.1.Representation showing aspects of Mayer’s research program.quest to facilitate‘‘meaningful’’learning,which Mayer defines as the ability to apply information and solve problems.Thus,Mayer’s research commonly includes measures of meaningful and nonmeaningful learning(e.g.,Mayer and Gallini,1990).Both types of learning are measured to illustrate that some learner activities or instructional methods foster meaningful learning, whereas others foster nonmeaningful or rote learning.Mayer’s research also alters and examines an array of instructional variables.He has examined various delivery systems such as lecture(Kiewra et al.,1991),text(Mayer,1984),and multimedia(Mayer and Sims,1994), most often in the content areas of math(Mayer,1993),science(Cook and Mayer,1988),and computer science(Mayer and Fay,1987);and he has examined a host of instructional methods such as questions(Sagerman and Mayer,1987),signals(Loman and Mayer,1983),organizers(Mayer,1978), and illustrations(Mayer,1989).Mayer has studied learner activities as well, including note taking(Peper and Mayer,1978),establishing text structure (Cook and Mayer,1988),and elaboration(Mayer,1980b).In addition, Mayer often considers how instructional methods and learner activities interact with individual learner characteristics such as spatial ability(Mayer and Sims,1994)and prior knowledge(Mayer et al.,1995).Each Mayer study examines the relationships among several of these factors.For instance,Mayer’s(1989)article‘‘Systematic Thinking Fostered144Kiewra and Creswell by Illustrations in Scientific Text’’assessed whether students with low knowledge(individual characteristic)about science(content)could transfer ideas(meaningful learning)or recognize verbatim facts(nonmeaningful learning)from text(delivery system)containing varying types of illustra-tions(instructional methods).From these studies,Mayer advises students,instructors,or instructional material developers about facilitating meaningful learning.He has done this by writing numerous review articles that address systematically portions of his research agenda.Mayer’s(1984)article‘‘Aids to Prose Comprehen-sion,’’for example,describes learner activities and instructional methods that facilitate the cognitive processes of attention,organization,and integra-tion,and thereby facilitate meaningful learning.Another example of May-er’s systematic approach to writing review articles is seen in his article ‘‘Multimedia Learning:Are We Asking the Right Questions?’’(Mayer, 1997).Here Mayer reviews research showing that(a)multimedia delivery systems are better than verbal explanations alone,(b)instructional methods involving coordinated verbal and visual explanations are better than expla-nations separated by time or space,and(c)effects are strongest for students with low prior knowledge and high spatial ability.In summary,through his research and interactive reports,Mayer examines systematically the instructional variables,learner activities,and learner characteristics that combine to influence meaningful learning.Mayer is also systematic about his research methods and his writing of research reports.For example,here he describes his development of research ideas:I begin with a well-defined problem that I’m trying to ually an idea beginson one sheet of paper.If I really like it,it gets its own folder.And,when I reallyget into it,it gets an expandingfile.That’s when I know I’m really committed. Mayer’s writing is equally systematic.First,he focuses the article on one major question such as,‘‘What are the characteristics of effective illustra-tions?’’Second,he often captures readers’attention by demonstrating in the introduction section the problem at hand such as solving math problems that contain inconsistent language or solving scientific problems using illus-trations.Another trademark characteristic inherent in Mayer’s research articles is clearly stated predictions or hypotheses,such as the competing quantitative qualitative hypotheses developed to explain repetition and signaling effects on student learning(Loman and Mayer,1983;Mayer, 1983).A last characteristic of Mayer’s systematic writing is his unmistakable knack for explaining results in a straightforward manner.Mayer explains his methods:I try to have each section of the Results section focus on one of the researchquestions and predictions....I begin by stating what the prediction or questionwas and try to describe the results in words,and then also refer the reader to afigure or table to document that.I think it’s important to say in words what theresults were before presenting statistics.Below is an example of Mayer’s technique for reporting results taken from Mayer and Gallini(1990,p.722).Prediction2:Explanati v e illustrations impro v e creati v e problem sol v ing but notv erbatim retention.The top-right portion of Figure5shows the proportion correctresponse for low prior-knowledge students in each treatment group on problemsolving and verbatim retention.As can be seen,the parts-and-steps group outper-formed the control group on problem solving(47%versus28%)but not on verbatimretention(66%versus68%).Consistent with Prediction2,the results of Experiment1,and the results of Mayer(1989b),separate t-tests conducted on these data revealedthat the groups differed in problem solving performance,t(28)ϭ3.51,pϽ.01,butnot in verbatim retention,t(28)Ͻ1.Michael Pressley-InterconnectorFor Michael Pressley there are no wasted steps.Everything he does pays off in multiple ways.His scholarship,teaching,and service are tightly knit so that his efforts in one area invariably pay dividends in other areas. Pressley’s graduate level teaching impacts his research and scholarship. Pressley says:I doubt there has been in the last10years a single graduate course that I’ve taughtwhere there hasn’t been some important written product that I did or a studentdid with me...there’s been some important piece of writing or some importantpiece of research...in every course.There are several examples of connecting teaching and scholarship. Pressley,along with students in his course on cognitive strategy instruction wrote the textbook Cogniti v e Strategy Instruction That Really Works with Children(Pressley et al.,1995).As another example,Pressley taught a graduate course on motivation.Teaching it for thefist time,Pressley scoured the motivation literature to prepare his course.This literature review both informed his teaching and helped him write a chapter on motivation.Writ-ing the chapter,in turn,prompted him to revamp the motivation course before teaching it a second time and prompted him to open his own investi-gations into college student motivation.A last example of teaching connect-ing to research occurred when Pressley was struggling to learn new ideas about anthropological research methods.One solution he devised was studying anthropological research methods in his graduate seminars.Work-ing through the literature and applying it with students helped Pressley clarify his own understanding and led him to conduct anthropologicallyoriented studies in reading(Pressley et al.,1992)and note taking(van Meter et al.,1994).Pressley’s research efforts have resulted in several books.The Pressley and Affenbach(1995)text,Verbal Protocols of Reading,shows the intercon-nection of research and scholarship.This text resulted from work done to construct a model of reading comprehension based upon analyses of think-aloud protocols.Pressley’s extensive research in educational psychology resulted in his writing a series of educational psychology textbooks.In collaboration with Christine McCormick,Pressley wrote three textbooks (Pressley,1995a,1995b;McCormick and Pressley,1997)aimed at advanced graduate students,beginning graduate students,or undergraduate students, respectively.As might be expected,Pressley wrote the texts with two ideas in mind:to educate students of educational psychology and to‘‘reedu-cate’’himself.Pressley’s service work derives multiple payoffs as well.As editor of the Journal of Educational Psychology and as consulting editor for several other journals,Pressley stands on the cutting edge of research and theory in educational psychology,a stance that influences his research and teaching. As a consultant,Pressley performs considerable service for school personnel and other agencies,but selects carefully those projects likely to influence other aspects of his work.Pressley says,‘‘I’ve never taken a consultation or accepted an invitation for anything unless I think I’m going to end up learning something from it that will contribute to my research.’’In fact, Pressley credits his consultations with psychologists and educators for help-ing him develop and hone ideas that later led to award winning articles: The International Reading Association’s1996Albert Harris Award (Pressley and Rankin,1994)and the American Educational Research Asso-ciation’s1995Scribner Award(Pressley et al.,1992).Pressley’s deliberate interconnection of teaching,research,and service activities is fueled by Pressley’s inclination to ponder issues of educational psychology almost constantly and to seek stimulating events that foster the development and cross-pollination of these issues.Pressley says, [Ideas]are constantly on my mind.And the people I’m working with,I’m alwaystalking to them about it...[for instance,I enjoy]consulting with Deshler andhis group in Kansas.Sometimes,we’ll just sit around for a day and a half andbrainstorm,and those are interesting sessions....I seek out literature in thebookstores or library or I sit in my office and think about the possibilities.I’m sortof always turning stuff over in my head,and then I’ll run into things that sort ofset off associations in my head and‘‘click.’’I make sure I get those down. Pressley’s insatiable pondering and search for knowledge is legendary. Pressley reportedly once walked out of a dull movie and read a book he had along with him in the lobby until the movie ended.He displays a business-like demeanor at conferences and in consultations.He relentlessly。
