Professor Emeritus receives Eminent Researcher Award

The Eminent Researcher Award is bestowed on a researcher whose career has involved major contributions to the field of learning and learning difficulties. Professor Chapman has a long history of researching and publishing in the area, including looking critically at Reading Recovery.

Professor Chapman says he was honoured to receive the award.

“The award recognises nearly 50 years of research, which started during my doctoral studies in Canada and continued with colleagues during my more than 40 years at Massey. It’s only very recently that significant policy changes have taken place on literacy teaching and learning, as a result of this research. The real winners in this will be beginning readers, their teachers and their parents. Trying to inform policy and practice has been my main motivation for doing the research and for continuing with it past my formal retirement.”

Professor Chapman is a Professor Emeritus of educational psychology in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University. He received his master’s in education from Victoria University of Wellington, and his PhD in educational psychology from the University of Alberta, Canada, specialising in cognitive-motivational factors associated with learning disabilities.

Before his doctoral studies, Professor Chapman trained and taught as a secondary school teacher. He joined Massey in 1980 following the completion of his PhD, and served for eight years as Head of the Department of Learning and Teaching, and 10 years as Pro Vice-Chancellor of the former College of Education.

He has published over 150 journal articles, book chapters and books on learning disabilities, literacy learning difficulties, early literacy development and motivational factors in academic achievement. In 1999, he was co-winner of the International Reading Association’s Dina Feitelson Award for Excellence in Research.

Professor Chapman was co-principal investigator of a Ministry of Education (MoE)-funded longitudinal research project focusing on literacy learning in year one children and professional development for teachers of year one children. More recently he was a science advisor for the New Zealand National Science Challenge—Better Start theme, and science advisor for the Better Start Literacy Approach research programme at the Child Wellbeing Research Institute at the University of Canterbury.

He recently completed work as a member of the MoE’s Advisory Group on Literacy and Mathematics and contributed to various MoE committees tasked with implementing Government literacy policies. He has served on or continues to serve on the editorial boards of numerous international journals and served a four-year term as president of the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities.