Update: Ben England, Psychology alum

Dr. Shane Murphy, Associate Professor of Psychology and long-time Psi Chi advisor, provides the following update about recent Psychology grad Ben England:

"Ben England graduated from WestConn in May 2008. He was the President of the WCSU chapter of Psi Chi, 2006-2007, and Vice-President of the Psychology Student Association. Before graduation he received the Psychology Department’s 'Psychology Spirit' award. In part, his citation read: 'you have demonstrated an unfailing enthusiasm for improving student life, for creating new learning opportunities for your fellow students, and for challenging yourself and others intellectually.'

"Ben is currently in his third year as a graduate student at Texas Tech University, in the Experimental Psychology: Applied Cognitive Division. His research focuses on a fairly new area in cognition; metacognition (thoughts about one’s thoughts). Within this area, Ben mainly focuses on how people evaluate their learning (e.g., Judgments of Learning or JOLs) and what may make their judgments more/less accurate. While JOLs are functional in the control of study time allocation, his research mainly focuses on the accuracy of the judgments and not the allocation element.

"In December Ben received his non-terminal M.A. after completing the required coursework and defending his thesis. Currently he has three scientific papers in preparation for publication. He is planning on taking his qualifying exams (to be admitted to doctoral candidacy) in September 2011, and from there will begin work on a dissertation. Ben says, 'I hope to be "Dr. England" by Spring 2013, and everything so far seems to be on track for that.'

"To get more information about the lab where Ben works at Texas Tech, follow this link:http://webpages.acs.ttu.edu/mserra/."

Way to go, Ben!  Thanks much, Dr. Murphy, for sharing this info with us.