Rate My Professor Stephanie Babb

Stephanie Babb is Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston-Downtown. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology with an emphasis in Neuroscience and Behavior from the University of Georgia in 2006 and joined the faculty at the University of Houston-Downtown in 2007, progressing to her current roles as full professor and department chair. In these capacities, she oversees the psychology program, coordinates degree advising, and serves as the Psychology department representative on the university's Research and Innovation Council, with voting rights through August 31, 2027. Babb has demonstrated commitment to faculty development and innovative pedagogy, including demonstrations of digital tools like VoiceThread to facilitate online student dialogues in place of traditional lectures.

Babb's academic interests center on episodic memory and the challenges faced by nontraditional undergraduate students, who form a significant portion of UHD's student body. Her research explores relationships among nontraditional status factors—such as age, employment, dependents, and enrollment intensity—and outcomes like academic entitlement, persistence via active learning, locus of control as a mediator, and predictors of social belonging, motivation, and self-efficacy. Notable publications include the book Meeting the Needs of Nontraditional Undergraduate Students (IGI Global, 2022); Assessing the Relationship Between Nontraditional Factors and Academic Entitlement (Journal of Continuing Higher Education, 2020, with Travis S. Crone); The Role of Locus of Control in Mediating the Relationship Between Nontraditional Factors and Academic Entitlement (2023, with Crone and others); and Social Belonging, Motivation, and Self-Efficacy in Nontraditional College Students (Journal of Continuing Higher Education, 2025). Her earlier work contributed to cognitive psychology through studies on animal memory, including Testing Pigeon Memory in a Change Detection Task (Learning & Behavior, 2010, with Caitlin Elmore, Sarah Alwin, Jeffrey S. Katz, and John Magnotti) and research on episodic-like memory in rats. Babb's scholarship has accumulated over 780 citations across 15 works. She received a Faculty Development Projects Award in 2023 recognizing excellence in classroom teaching, service, and creative activities.