Professional Literature Summary Template

Article #5

Bib. Information Bogner, K., Dolezal, S., Pressley, M., Raphael, L.M., & Roehrig, A. (2002).
(APA Formatting): Balanced Literacy Instruction. Focus on Exceptional Children, 34(5), p.1-14.
Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net

Author(s) Affiliation: The authors were all at the Department of Psychology at the University of
Notre Dame. Bogner is now in the School Psychology Program at the
University of Minnesota

Type of Resource: Trade

(Scholarly
/Trade/Other)

Summary of essential
information:
Effective literacy in the elementary schools balance teaching of skills.
One author, Pressley, along with his colleagues studied both effective
and ineffective instruction in elementary schools. All of the effective
programs had some form of balanced teaching.
One school described their program as being a lot of skills instruction
with extensive amounts of time for literature and writing. The skills
instruction was taught through reading and writing.
The five authors study consisted of nine teachers. Five were considered
effective while the other four were considered to be more typical.
Results of the study through observations:
o Students in some classrooms were better readers with most
students reading at or above grade level.
o Writing was higher in some classrooms than others. Students had
a better understanding of capitalization, punctuation, and
spelling.
o Students were more engaged in some classes.
Qualities of effective classrooms
o Combination of skills instruction and real experiences with
reading.
o Scaffolding
o Students encouraged to work independently
o Ample opportunities for students to respond to reading through
writing.
o Teachers had high expectations
Components of balanced program
o Phonemic awareness consisted of word games over the course of
a months a few minutes each day.
 o Word recognition using either synthetic or whole word approach.
o Vocabulary is taught explicitly.
o Comprehension strategies are taught individually (predicting,
questioning, clarifying, visualization, summarizing) using
teacher scaffolding
o Self-monitoring allows students to ask, am I making sense?

Potential relevance to Bogner, Dolezal, Pressley, Raphael, and Roehrig, wrote this article following
your research topic the study of several successful balanced literacy classrooms. Their study not
and study: only proved that balanced literacy can be effective, but also gave the reader
knowledge about certain ways the educators go about presenting content to
students. Throughout my implementation of this program, several of the
suggestions made through this article may be observed in my classroom.