David Klahr

David Klahr is the Walter van Dyke Bingham Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development and Education Sciences in the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT and his Ph.D. in organizations and social behavior from Carnegie Mellon University. His earlier work addressed cognitive processes in such diverse areas as voting behavior, college admissions, consumer choice, peer review and problem solving. Klahr pioneered the application of information-processing analysis to questions of cognitive development, and formulated the first computational models to account for children’s thinking processes. 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. His current research focuses on cognitive development, scientific reasoning, and cognitively-based instructional interventions in early science education. His edited, authored, and co-authored books include Cognition and Instruction (1976), Cognitive Development: An Information Processing View (1976), Production System Models of Learning and Development (1987), Complex Information Processing: the Impact of Herbert A. Simon (1989); Exploring Science: the Cognition and Development of Discovery Processes (2000); and Cognition and Instruction: 25 years of Progress (2001). He served on the three NRC committees that produced Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment (2001), Advancing Scientific Research in Education (2004,) and Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8 (2007).