2020 Retiring Faculty

Dale Swartzentruber

Professor of Psychology
(1992-2020)

After growing up in central Ohio and receiving a B.S. in psychology from The Ohio State University, Dale Swartzentruber received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Vermont in 1989. After two years of post-doctoral research studying associative learning at the University of Pennsylvania, he was hired by the Ohio Wesleyan Psychology Department in 1992 to teach Research Methods, Learning Theory, and Introductory Psychology. He was a member of numerous faculty and university committees, and took on increasing administrative responsibilities, eventually becoming OWU’s associate provost for institutional research.

His scholarly research focused on the mechanisms through which organisms form associations between events that they experience. He is known in the scientific community for studying “higher-order” associations, in which animals learn to use their physical context to categorize the relationship between events that they experience. Working with OWU students, he produced numerous brief videos of typical behaviors and techniques studied in the laboratory by animal-learning researchers. These videos continue to be shown to students by educators around the world.

He is perhaps best remembered by students for his “rat lab” in the Research Methods in Psychology course. After learning to shape a behavior, students studied the effects of different variables on the occurrence of that behavior. OWU psychology alumni frequently cite that lab as one of their most memorable college experiences.

Dale raised an African grey parrot, Pip, to study animal cognition. Pip was a frequent visitor to the Psychology Department. He often greeted visitors from his cage at the entrance to the department.

Dale is known for his amiable relationships with faculty and staff across the University. His various roles on committees provided him with extensive knowledge of the inner workings of the University. He especially enjoyed summarizing and reporting on enrollment trends and patterns, including predictive modeling of retention and the factors that affect the likelihood of persisting to graduation. He administered numerous surveys to faculty, staff, and students, and he was respected for his ability to tailor the final reports to the appropriate audience.

Dale currently resides outside of Delaware with his wife, Jan, and several animals, including two horses and a donkey named Maria. He enjoys learning new skills and spends much of his time woodworking, playing his banjo, growing pumpkins, making trails through the woods, and building a barn that will likely never be fully completed.