2009 Award Recipient

Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology

Judith Torney-Purta, PhD, a professor of human development at the University of Maryland, College Park, since 1981, is being honored for her lifetime contributions to developing civic knowledge and democratic attitudes around the world, promoting international collaborative efforts in research and infusing her teaching with an international perspective.

Torney-Purta is slated to receive the American Psychological Association’s 2009 Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology at the 117th annual APA convention in Toronto in August.

Torney-Purta has conducted psychological research for nearly 40 years on young people's knowledge of democracy and the social and political attitudes necessary to maintain it. She has also spearheaded efforts at the National Academies of Science to address the challenges to international research.

She has received several awards for her research, including APA’s Decade of Behavior Award for Research Relating to Democracy in 2005, the Nevitt Sanford Prize of the International Society of Political Psychology in 2001 and the University of Maryland’s International Landmark Research Award in 2005.

Torney-Purta is the author or editor of six books reporting research on political knowledge and attitudes. The first was “The Development of Political Attitudes in Children,” (Aldine Transaction, 1967), and one of the most recent was “Citizenship and Education in Twenty-Eight Countries: Civic Knowledge and Engagement at Age Fourteen,” (IEA Amsterdam, 2001).She served from 1994 to 2004 as chair of the International Steering Committee for the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement Civic Education Study and was responsible for the research consensus process as well as major parts of a survey design and analysis of an international study that measured adolescents' belief in the importance of citizenship.

Earlier in her career, she was professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Stanford University and her master’s and doctoral degrees in human development from the University of Chicago.