Knox Graduate Jared Keeley Wins Teaching Award

Jared Keeley, a recent graduate of Knox College, has received the prestigious Wilbert J. McKeachie Award from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology. The annual award from the American Psychological Association is given to only one graduate student in the nation, in recognition of outstanding teaching.

A 2002 Knox graduate, Keeley recently completed graduate studies at Auburn University in Alabama and starting in the fall will teach at Mississippi State University. Keeley, who came to Knox from Highlands Ranch, Colorado, majored in psychology and classics.

"This award belongs as much to the faculty at Knox as it does to me." Keeley said after receiving the award. "I very much modeled my own teaching style after the caring, insightful, challenging, and passionate professionalism of the Knox professors whom I had the good fortune to know. My success in winning the award is just a reflection of their success every day in the classroom with their students."

At Auburn, Keeley has served as a teaching assistant for numerous undergraduate psychology courses, including Statistics for the Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Introduction to Psychology. He also has supervised other graduate student teaching assistants.

At Knox, Keeley graduated summa cum laude, winning the E. Inman Fox Prize for outstanding achievements that span the liberal arts curriculum. He also received the Lawrence Prize in Latin, the Edith Powers Van Dyke Memorial Award in Psychology, and the Robert Stevens Harper Prize for Graduate Study in Psychology. Keeley graduated from Knox with College Honors, awarded for an in-depth research project in cognitive psychology. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Psi Chi, the national honor society in psychology.

Keeley has conducted research in psychopathology and in the psychometric properties of the Teacher Behavior Checklist, an assessment tool that helps psychology teachers evaluate their own classroom performance. Keeley has published research articles in ToP, The APS Observer, and Psychology Teacher Network.

Keeley has received high praise from both students and colleagues at Auburn. One faculty member at Auburn told a psychology journal, "He is an outstanding young teacher... Quite frankly, I don't know what more a graduate student could do, either in terms of quality or quantity, to show his commitment to college and university teaching. He is simply excellent at everything he does."

Founded in 1837, Knox is a national liberal arts college in Galesburg, Illinois, with students from 47 states and 48 countries. Knox's "Old Main" is a National Historic Landmark and the only building remaining from the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.