Rate My Professor Adele Gottfried

Adele Gottfried is Professor Emerita of Educational Psychology and Counseling in the Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling at California State University, Northridge. She earned her Ph.D. in educational and developmental psychology from the Graduate School of the City University of New York in 1975, an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1968, and a B.A. in educational psychology and counseling from Queens College of the City University of New York in 1967. A licensed psychologist in the State of California, Gottfried served as Director of Research Enhancement in the Michael D. Eisner College of Education at CSUN. She was honored as one of the university's top professors in 2017 and retired following a distinguished career there. Her academic interests center on developmental learning and instruction within educational psychology.

Gottfried's research specializations encompass academic intrinsic motivation and its longitudinal development from childhood through late adolescence, relations to giftedness and achievement, and the roles of cognitively stimulating home environments and parental motivational practices. She co-directed the Fullerton Longitudinal Study with Allen W. Gottfried, yielding influential publications including the books Gifted IQ: Early Developmental Aspects - The Fullerton Longitudinal Study (1994, co-authored with Allen W. Gottfried, Kay Bathurst, and Diana Wright Guerin), Maternal Employment and Children’s Development (1988, co-authored with Allen W. Gottfried), and Academic Motivation and the Culture of the School in Childhood and Adolescence (2008, co-edited with Cynthia Hudley). Notable papers include "Role of parental motivational practices in children's academic intrinsic motivation and achievement" (Journal of Educational Psychology, 1994), "Role of cognitively stimulating home environment in children's academic intrinsic motivation: A longitudinal study" (Child Development, 1998), "Continuity of academic intrinsic motivation from childhood through late adolescence: A longitudinal study" (Journal of Educational Psychology, 2001), and "A longitudinal study of academic intrinsic motivation in intellectually gifted children: Childhood through early adolescence" (Gifted Child Quarterly, 1996). Gottfried is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Divisions 7, 9, and 15), the Association for Psychological Science, the Western Psychological Association, and an inaugural Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. She received the Western Psychological Association Social Responsibility Award in 2011 and the MENSA International Limited Award for Excellence in Research in 1997. Her longitudinal research has profoundly impacted understanding of motivational processes in education and child development.