David Klahr holds the Walter van Dyke Bingham Chair of Cognitive Development and Education Sciences in the Department of Psychology at CMU. He is currently Director of the Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER), a doctoral training grant funded by the Office of Education, and PostPIER, a post-doctoral training grant aso funded by the Office of Education. 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 computer based models to questions of cognitive

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. One of his current projects is to create an intelligent tutor to teach the procedural and conceptual bases of experiment design. He is a member of the National Academy of Education, a Fellow of the APA, a Charter Fellow of the APS, a Member of the Society for Research in Child Development, the Cognitive Science Society. 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 NSF’s subcommittee on Memory and Cognitive Processes, and the NIH’s Human Development and Aging Study Section. He has served on three Committees of the National Research Council: 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).

Talk Title: From basic research on scientific reasoning to educational engineering for middle school science

Date: March, 10th

Time: 09:30 – 10:30