I am currently investigating pre-service teachers, and other students in higher education, attitudes and perceptions of student's school interactions involving empathy. My research interests include the use of web based animated narrative vignette technologies (social simulations) as a methodology to understand cognitive and emotional responses of educators and other professionals in helping professions.

Judy Scotchmoor is Assistant Director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) in Berkeley, overseeing the museum’s education and outreach efforts. Judy received her BS in Biological Sciences at UC Berkeley in 1966 and then proceeded on to a long teaching career, primarily at the middle school level. Judy began her career at UCMP as a volunteer in the fossil prep lab in 1993, before joining the staff the following year. Taking advantage of her K-12 experiences, she soon initiated teacher professional development workshops and curriculum development focusing on evolution, paleontology, the geosciences, and their intersection reflected in the biodiversity that we see today. With a creative group of graduate students placing UCMP as a pioneer in web-based technology, she began to see the potential of the Internet to share science with a broad and diverse audience. Today she is the Project Coordinator of three award-winning websites: The Paleontology Portal, Understanding Evolution, and Understanding Science. She was also Project Coordinator for Geosciences in Alaska, a field and research opportunity for teachers and is the editor/author of three books to support K-16 teaching: Evolution: Investigating the evidence, Learning from the Fossil Record, and Dinosaurs: The science behind the stories. Judy was the recipient of the Joseph T. Gregory Award for outstanding service to the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2004, the recipient of the American Institute of Biological Sciences Education Award in 2006, and in 2009 was named an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow “for leadership in defending teaching of evolution and quality science education through nationally recognized websites on these issues and through leadership of the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science."

I was originally trained as an applied developmental psychology with an interest in cognitive development and schooling. I have over the years moved a variety of directions. Over the years I have done research focusing on problem solving in mathematics, cognitive monitoring, and motivation. During the later part of the 1990s I began to shift my focus to become a program evaluator and spent some time doing that work mostly in the context of STEM related initiatives. I also have become very interested in assessment. Over the years, I have reviewed a number of tests and measures for the Mental Measurements Yearbook. Because of my interest in problem solving, engineering design, and other complex cognitive processes, I am especially interested in the complexity of developing and validating new assessments (both formative and summative) that address the more learning outcomes people believe are important for the 21st century. As a professor, I teach courses in the psychology of learning, statistics, research methods, program evaluation, and assessment. I also serve as Director of Assessment and Evaluation for the College of Education at the University of South Alabama. So, I also have an interest in the how teachers are trained and assessment of teacher education.