College of Education
Dennis N. Thompson, Ph.D.
Professor and Program Coordinator of Educational Psychology
Phone: 404-413-8319
Email: dthompson@gsu.edu
Department of Educational Psychology & Special Education
Georgia State University
P.O. Box 3979
Atlanta, GA 30302-3979
Education
Ph.D Ohio State University, Columbus Ohio, 1977, Developmental Psychology
M.A. Ohio State University, Columbus Ohio, 1974, Developmental Psychology
B.A. Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio, 1972, Psychology
Major Areas of Interest
My research interests have been concerned with two lines of inquiry. The first is in the field of adult development and aging. A second and somewhat newer line of inquiry represents my interest in the history of the field of life-span development.
Description of recent research activities, funded projects, and scholarly activities:
Current investigations underway include a partial replication of Floyd Ruch's 1930 dissertation from the Stanford Later Maturity Studies. Ruch found that as adults age they have difficulty learning new materials that are unfamiliar to them, and even more difficulty with materials which interfere with past learning. Like many cross-sectional studies, this study was open to criticism because differences in cohort may have led to the reported results. My graduate students and I were able to acquire Ruch's original materials. We replicated the study, modernizing a few aspects of the design. Results were similar to Ruch's, suggesting that age group differences hold up in two studies conducted nearly 70 years apart. My current effort is to replicate this study a second time but in Turkey, a country where I have done some previous work. With this set of data, we will have data from 1930 and 1999 in the America, and contemporary cross-cultural data on this classic in the cognitive aging literature.
I just published a series of 5 DVDs titled Classic Films for Psychology with Prentice Hall in New York. The project makes historical film of major figures in psychology available in a modern format. There is a DVD devoted to general psychology, experimental psychology, clinical psychology, developmental psychology, and social psychology. The intention of this project was to locate original film of the people and their work and to avoid re-enactments. In some cases there is film of laboratory investigations made by the original researchers. In other cases, there are interviews with major figures from the past and the recent past. Film located for this project dates from approximately 1914 to the mid 1970’s.
In terms of more contemporary data analysis, my graduate students and I undertook an investigation of the effect of supplemental instruction, an intervention used in many colleges and universities across the United States. One of the questions in intervention research is whether the intervention in question not only benefits, but how long do the beneficial effects last. A second consideration is whether the intervention generalizes beyond the immediate setting. We found in a two-year longitudinal study that the effects of a well run supplemental instruction program not only lasted well beyond the semester in which it was administered, but the effect generalized to a variety of other classes.
Courses Taught
- EPY 2050: Human Growth and Development
- EPY 2050H: Human Growth and Development, Honors Program
- EPY 7080: Psychology of Learning and Learners
- EPY 8180: The School Aged Child
- EPY 8070: Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning
- EPY 8260: The Psychology of Adulthood and Aging