Judith Torney-Purta

Judith Torney-Purta is a developmental and educational psychologist who is Professor Emerita in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland. She earned her undergraduate degree from Stanford University (in Psychology) and her PH.D. from the University of Chicago (in Human Development). In her early career she was Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.. She has conducted interdisciplinary survey research for more than fifty years on young people’s civic knowledge and engagement, on their acquisition of political attitudes, and on civic education (in the US, in Europe and in Latin America). She has also studied adolescents’ political thinking using think-aloud-methodology. She has supervised research in a range of aspects of social development during middle childhood and adolescence. Recently she has been involved in encouraging the secondary analysis of existing large-scale data sets (especially those at the CivicLEADS Archive at ICPSR/University of Michigan). Her most recent book is Influences of the IEA Civic and Citizenship Education Studies: Policy, Practice and Research across Countries and Regions (co-edited with B. Malak-Minkiewicz).