COE Faculty Profile

Margaret W. Cohen, Ph.D.
Interim Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Director, College of Education

Associate Professor
Division of Educational Psychology, Research and Evaluation

Email: Peggy_Cohen@umsl.edu
Office: 421 Woods Hall
Phone: 314-516-4508

Education

Professor Cohen received an A.B. from Washington University with majors in elementary education and psychology. She taught autistic children for 3 years before earning a Ph.D. in educational psychology from Washington University in 1979. Dr. Cohen held a joint appointment in educational psychology and teacher education for 2 years at the State University of New York at Albany and a similar appointment at the University of Houston for a year before her appointment to the School of Education in 1980. She has been a fellow in the Public Policy Research Centers. Professor Cohen is a member of Phi Delta Kappa, the American Educational Research Association, and the Association of Teacher Educators, and the Board of Directors of the Gifted Resource Council. She is co-chair of the Joint Task Force on the Elementary Education Curriculum, a working committee with faculty representatives from the School of Education and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Research and Teaching

I routinely teach undergraduate and graduate sections of the foundational educational psychology courses and feel an enormous responsibility to facilitating the growth of tomorrow's teachers. I redesign my courses continuously with the goal of engaging my students in the learning process. A current challenge is to integrate curricula by including the study of exceptionalities into the study of psychology. Research questions about professional development guide the evaluation of my efforts.

Motivation theory was the focus of my early research and continues to be a current flowing through other topics in which I have a research interest: the professional development of teachers, the school reform agenda, the Missouri Accelerated Schools Project, and reform in higher education. The influence of psychology on my thinking is apparent in my interest in the differences that make us individuals. My thinking about education is an obsession: I want all teachers and learners to benefit from what we know about psychology.

Representative Publications

• Cohen, M.W. (1986). Intrinsic motivation in the special education classroom. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 19, 258- 261.
• Cohen, M.W. (1986). Research on motivation: New content for the teacher preparation curriculum. Journal of Teacher Education, 37, 23-28.
• Cohen, M.W. (1994). Accelerated schools: Missouri's response. The Kansas Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development Record, 12(20), 24-30.

• Faculty Development
• Motivation
• Postsecondary Education
• Professional Development
• Teacher Education/Development
• Teacher Research