Denis Dumas

I am fascinated by the way humans learn. As a psychologist of creative education, I work to deepen the evidence available for scientifically understanding learning and creativity, while also supporting the needs of educational stake-holders to make informed, data-driven decisions. To accomplish this, my collaborators and I have built new tests and measures, tracked nonlinear learning trajectories over the course of schooling, and modeled the cognitive processes involved in expert performance, among many other projects. As an overarching goal, I seek to identity students’ potential to learn that may otherwise be under-estimated.

My work has been funded by the Department of Education, the Naval Research Lab, and the National Academy of Education. I am currently an Incoming Associate Editor at Thinking Skills and Creativity, am a Full Member of the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation, and was recently named the 4th best-published early career educational psychologist for the years 2015-21 by Educational Psychology Review. With my collaborator Dan McNeish, I won the 2021 Tanaka Award from the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology.

More information about the Measure of Original Thinking in Elementary School, including information on how to access and administer the test can be found here.

If you are interested in using the Open Creativity Scoring freeware, you can find it here.

Interested in becoming an educational psychologist? I am expecting to accept a new funded graduate student in Fall 2023.