Rate My Professor Steve Provost

Dr. Steve Provost serves as Research Assistant and Teaching Associate in the Faculty of Health at Southern Cross University, where he joined in 2001. He obtained his BSc (Hons) and PhD from the University of New South Wales during the 1980s, complemented by a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education from UNSW. Earlier in his career, Provost held academic positions at the Australian National University, Macquarie University, and the University of Newcastle. In teaching, he delivers an undergraduate unit on behaviour change and an Honours unit in research methods, alongside a broad spectrum of psychology courses including physiological psychology, learning and memory, and quantitative methods. He supervises postgraduate students on projects involving emotional processing, sustainable behaviour, gambling, and human factors. Provost maintains memberships in the Australian Psychological Society, Association for Psychological Science, Association for Behavior Analysis International, Australian Association for Behaviour Analysis, New Zealand Association for Behaviour Analysis, and European Association for Behaviour Analysis.

Provost's research focuses on learning and behaviour analysis, psychophysiology, psychopharmacology, and scholarship of teaching and learning. His influential publications include 'Vitamin D3 enhances mood in healthy subjects during winter' (Psychopharmacology, 1998), 'Effects of nicotine gum on repeated administration of the Stroop test' (Psychopharmacology, 1991), 'Improving teaching capacity to increase student achievement: The key role of data interpretation by school leaders' (Journal of Educational Administration, 2016), 'School leadership and school improvement: An examination of school readiness factors' (School Leadership & Management, 2019), 'The correlation between “teacher readiness” and student learning improvement' (International Journal of Innovation, Creativity and Change, 2017), and 'Young people who engage in child to parent violence: An integrative review of correlates and developmental pathways' (Australian Journal of Psychology, 2021). He co-authored the textbook Psychology 4e (Cengage AU, 2023) and contributed to works on Australian undergraduate psychology curricula, such as 'Graduate attributes of the 4-year Australian undergraduate psychology program' (Australian Psychologist, 2009). His scholarship has advanced psychological education and behavioural research in Australia.