David Klahr (born 1939) is an American

psychologist A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and interpretation of how indi ...

whose research ranges across the fields of cognitive development,

psychology of science The psychology of science is a branch of the studies of social science defined most simply as the study of scientific thought or behavior. It is a collection of studies of various topics. The thought of psychology has been around since the late 19 ...

, and educational psychology and has been a professor at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

since 1969. He is the Walter van Dyke Bingham Professor of Cognitive Development and

Education Sciences Education sciences or education theory (traditionally often called ''pedagogy'') seek to describe, understand, and prescribe education policy and practice. Education sciences include many topics, such as pedagogy, andragogy, curriculum, learning, ...

and a member of the National Academy of Education, a Fellow of the

American Psychological Association The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It ha ...

, a Charter Fellow of the

Association for Psychological Science The Association for Psychological Science (APS), previously the American Psychological Society, is an international non-profit organization whose mission is to promote, protect, and advance the interests of scientifically oriented psychology in ...

, on the Governing Board of the

Cognitive Development Society Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of Intellect, intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attentio ...

, a member of the

Society for Research in Child Development The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) is a professional society for the field of human development, focusing specifically on child development. It is a multidisciplinary, not-for-profit, professional association with a membership of ...

, and the

Cognitive Science Society The Cognitive Science Society is a professional society for the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. It brings together researchers from many fields who hold the common goal of understanding the nature of the human mind. The society prom ...

. He was an associate editor of ''Developmental Psychology'' and has served on the editorial boards of several cognitive science journals, as well as on the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

's subcommittee on Memory and Cognitive Processes, and the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

's Human Development and Aging Study Section. He has served on three committees of the

National Research Council National Research Council may refer to: * National Research Council (Canada), sponsoring research and development * National Research Council (Italy), scientific and technological research, Rome * National Research Council (United States), part of ...

: the Committee on Foundations of Educational Assessment (Knowing What Students Know, National Academies Press, 2001), the Committee on Research in Education (Advancing Scientific Research in Education, National Academies Press, 2004) and the Committee on Science Learning (Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K–8, National Academies Press, 2007). He also serves as member of the advisory board for the Brain, Mind & Behavior Program of the

James S. McDonnell Foundation The James S. McDonnell Foundation was founded in 1950 by aerospace pioneer James S. McDonnell. It was established to "improve the quality of life," and does so by contributing to the generation of new knowledge through its support of research and ...

Life

He received his undergraduate degree from MIT in electrical engineering (1960), and his Ph.D. in 1968 fro
Carnegie Mellon's Graduate School of Industrial Administration ("GSIA", now the Tepper School of Business)
in Organizations and Social Behavior. From 1966 to 1969, he was an assistant professor at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

with joint appointments in the School of Business and the Department of Mathematics. In 1968–69 was a visiting research fellow at the University of Stirling,

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...

, and a visiting Fulbright lecturer at the London School of Business. He returned to

with joint appointment in GSIA and psychology in 1969, and became professor of psychology in 1976. He served as head of the Psychology Department from 1983 to 1993, and is currently director of the Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER), a doctoral training grant funded by the Office of Education.

Scientific contributions

Throughout his career, Klahr has focused on the analysis of complex cognitive processes in such diverse areas as voting behavior, college admissions, consumer choice, peer review, problem solving and scientific reasoning. He pioneered the application of information processing analysis to questions of cognitive development, and, in collaboration with Iain Wallace, formulated the first computer simulation models to account for children's performance on a variety of Piagetian tasks and other types of problems. Dr. Klahr's most recent research has investigated the cognitive processes that support children's understanding of the fundamental principles underlying scientific thinking. This work includes both basic research with pre-school children and more applied classroom studies of how to improve the teaching of experimental science in elementary school. He has worked in a wide variety of schools in the

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Wester ...

region, focusing on the relative effectiveness of different instructional methods for teaching children how to design and interpret simple experiments

Bibliography

* 1966. ''A computer simulation of the paradox of voting'', ''American Political Science Review'', LX, 384–390 * 1976. (with J. G. Wallace). ''Cognitive Development: An Information-Processing View'' * 1988. (with Kevin Dunbar). ''Dual space search during scientific reasoning'', ''Cognitive Science'', 12(1), 1–48 * 2000. ''Exploring Science: The Cognition and Development of Discovery Processes'', Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

References

External links

The 37th Carnegie Symposium on Cognition: From Child to Scientist: Mechanisms of Learning and Development; A Festschrift in honor of the scientific and educational contributions of David Klahr4Researchers.org lectures by David KlahrDavid Klahr's CMU web pageDavid Klahr's personal web page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Klahr, David Carnegie Mellon University faculty Tepper School of Business alumni American cognitive scientists American educational psychologists Living people 1939 births Fellows of the American Psychological Association