Reid Riggle

Associate Professor of Education and Co-Chair of Teacher Education

B.A., Coe College 
M.A., University of Iowa 
Ph.D., University of Iowa

Programs: Education, Social Sciences 

My background in educational psychology serves as the foundation for all my work at St. Norbert College. Educational psychology provides a significant piece of the foundational knowledge teachers need to guide student learning. The field has three main strands: human development, learning and motivation and assessment and evaluation. The Psychology of Teaching course (along with EDUC 125) is the initial course in our teacher education program. Thus, I work with first-year and sophomore pre-service teachers to help them generate a solid understanding of how children learn and what motivates them to achieve.

In the Early Adolescent Block, I serve as the leader of an integrated experience that provides pre-service teachers with the opportunity to study the nature and needs of early adolescent learners, the structure of schools for these students, as well as the curriculum and teaching strategies that are effective with students at this level. Pre-service teachers in the EAB are also given the opportunity to teach groups of early adolescent students during two collaborative projects at our partner middle school.

In addition to my teaching responsibilities, I serve as the education discipline’s accreditation coordinator. In this role, I work with the chair and members of the discipline to coordinate an ongoing review of the discipline’s certification programs, including collection and analysis of student performance and program data.

My professional work centers on collaborations between higher education and K-12 schools and assessment. One of my major activities in recent years involved serving as a program evaluation consultant for science and geography education programs. My research interests include: defining an effective model of achievement for pre-service teachers and assessment systems to measure relevant learning outcomes within such a model, judging student competence and teacher quality, how changes in technology and consumption of information have affected student learning and motivation, and effective assessment of teacher dispositions.



Learn more about Professor Riggle.

Courses
EDUC 120 Psychology for Teaching 
EDUC 322 The Adolescent: Psychology and Methods in the Middle School 
EDUC 334 Middle School Field Experience 
SSCI 220 Lifespan Human Development