Michael Scriven

Michael Scriven is a Distinguished Professor of the Division of Behavioral & Organizational Sciences at Claremont Graduate University. His research fields include evaluation, philosophy of science, and computers. His 50 years of teaching have been in departments of mathematics, philosophy, psychology, the history and philosophy of science, law, evaluation, and education.

Scriven received an honors BA in Mathematics and then an honors MA in the Philosophy of Mathematical Logic at the University of Melbourne before receiving his PhD in Philosophy at Oxford University. Nearly 50 years after this PhD, Scriven received an honorary doctorate in Education from the University of Melbourne. He is the former president of the American Educational Research Association and of the American Evaluation Association, and he is the recipient of the American Evaluation Association’s Lazarsfeld Medal for contributions to evaluation theory.

Throughout his career, Scriven has taught in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, including 12 years at the University of California, Berkeley. He has also held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto), the Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Psychology (University of Alberta), the Educational Testing Service (Princeton), the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (Santa Barbara), the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, the National Science Foundation, and as a Whitehead Fellow at Harvard University.

His more than 400 publications are mainly in the fields of his appointments and in the areas of critical thinking, technology studies, computer studies, and evaluation. He is or has been on the editorial boards of 42 journals in these nine fields and others, such as psychiatry, and has edited several of them, including University MicroNews.