The Department of Teaching and Learning
Ken Springer, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Dr. Springer is a developmental psychologist. After receiving his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1990, he served on the faculty of SMU's psychology department before moving to the University's School of Education and Human Development in 2002. Currently Dr. Springer is part of the school's Department of Teaching and Learning's secondary education program and represents the school on the Faculty Senate.
Dr. Springer currently teaches undergraduate classes in adolescent development and educational psychology, as well as a research methods course for M.Ed. students. Dr. Springer is active as a researcher, with more than 60 scientific publications and presentations focusing on how children acquire knowledge about biological phenomena such as kinship and illness, and he is currently writing a graduate-level educational research textbook for Wiley. Dr. Springer's administrative work includes serving as chair of the SMU Institutional Review Board from 2005 to present, and as secretary of the Faculty Senate in 2006 and 2007. In addition, Dr. Springer is involved in substantial community service work. He has been on the board of directors of several nonprofit organizations that serve families and children, and through pro bono grant writing, he has raised more than a million dollars on their behalf. Dr. Springer has served as an expert witness on more than a dozen cases and has been interviewed by various local and national media, including USA Today and National Public Radio. He is also the proud father of a first-year student at Brown University.
Sample Publications and Papers
Springer, K. (in preparation).
Preschoolers’ understanding of kinship: Evidence from a new methodology.
Springer, K. (2001). Perceptual boundedness and perceptual support in
conceptual development. Psychological Review, 108, 691-708.
Springer, K. (1999). How a naive theory of biology is acquired. In M.
Siegal and C. Peterson (Eds.) Children’s understanding of biology and health.
Cambridge Series in Perceptual and
Cognitive Development. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Springer, K. (1997). Conceptual
coherence in children’s understanding of kinship. Invited paper presented at the
7th annual meeting of the European Association for Research in Learning and
Instruction, Athens, Greece.
Springer, K. (1996). Young children's understanding of a biological basis
for parent-offspring relations. Child Development, 67, 2841-2856.
Springer, K. (1993). How a naive theory of kinship is acquired. Invited
paper, Symposium on Naive Theories, 12th Biennial Meeting of the International
Society for the Study of Behavioral Development, Recife, Brazil.