FOUNDER OF PITT'S LRDC WINS AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION AWARD

PITTSBURGH, Aug. 14 -- Robert Glaser, founder of the University of Pittsburgh Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), is the 1998 winner of the Franklin V. Taylor Award presented annually by the American Psychological Association's (APA) Division of Applied Experimental and Engineering Psychology.

Glaser, an internationally recognized scholar in the psychology of learning, cognition, and instruction, received the lifetime achievement award at the APA annual meeting today.

The Squirrel Hill resident joined Pitt's Department of Psychology in 1956 after an assistant professorship at the University of Illinois and four years as senior research scientist at the American Institutes for Research. Glaser founded LRDC in 1963 and served as its director until 1997.

His current work focuses on thinking and problem solving in instruction, the nature of expertise, the assessment of subject-matter learning, and the relations between cognitive science and educational measurement. Glaser referred to his early work as "adaptive education," which to him encompassed a vision of an education system devoted to teaching all students to optimize their potential.

Awards Glaser has received include a Guggenheim Fellowship; the American Educational Research Association Award for Distinguished Research; the American Psychological Association's E. L. Thorndike Award and its Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology; and the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award of the American Psychological Society. In 1995 Glaser was awarded the Pitt Chancellor's Distinguished Research Award; and that same year from the National Society for Performance and Instruction, the Distinguished Professional Achievement Award.

Glaser's most recent honors are the Distinguished Achievement Award by the UCLA Center for the Study of Evaluation; the APA Distinguished Lifetime Contribution to Evaluation, Measurement, and Statistics; and the E. F. Lindquist Award of the American Educational Research Association.

As president of the National Academy of Education, Glaser initiated exchange visits with psychological and educational researchers in Moscow and Tbilisi. He also served as president of the American Educational Research Association and the American Psychological Association's Divisions of Evaluation and Measurement and Educational Psychology.

Glaser has been a consultant to numerous commissions and foundations. Author or editor of more than 20 books and 220 articles, Glaser edits the Advances in Instructional Psychology series and sits on the editorial boards of several scientific journals.

-30-