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Thorsheim concludes NSF psychophysiology project

By Catherine Monson '12
April 22, 2010

St. Olaf Professor of Psychology Howard Thorsheim ’63 has completed a six-year project that introduced community college instructors to psychophysiology, the study of mind-body interaction that is not commonly taught in community colleges.

In one stage of the project, funded by a National Science Foundation grant, Thorsheim developed a “National Workshop Support Model” that introduced teachers to psychophysiology lab experiments and served as a model for teaching those skills to other instructors. One of the workshops was held at St. Olaf in 2007, and it engaged 32 faculty from community colleges across America. Overall, the $400,000 NSF project involved faculty from 52 colleges in 27 states, and a student sample of 1,745.

Thorsheim estimates that several thousand students have been impacted by the project, but he anticipates that number will grow as more instructors adopt his workshop model and create the intended ripple effect. In a final report, Thorsheim concluded that his work has significantly increased participating instructors’ and their students’ comfort with and sense of competence in psychophysiology.

In addition, the grant provided new technology for instructors to implement classroom experiments.

“It was a partnership approach,” Thorsheim says. “We weren’t doing something to the colleges — we were working with them to improve science education in America.”

Watch a video about the project.

Contact David Gonnerman at 507-786-3315 or gonnermd@stolaf.edu.