Denis Cronin
Adjunct Associate Professor

Denis Cronin teaches Foundations of Social Work Practice and Clinical Case Evaluation at the Columbia University School of Social Work (CUSSW).

Mr. Cronin's professional interest in psychology has focused on combining individual differences psychology with experimental psychology. This has led to his interest in developing educational treatments that optimize the fit between characteristics of the individual in the areas of cognitive style, intelligence, and personality, and the educational treatment that is likely to make most use of the these qualities. His interests in qualitative and process evaluation led to his extensive study of the process of implementation of educational innovations targeted toward disadvantage youth. This research highlighted numerous factors at the micro and macro level that would be likely to enhance fidelity of implementation of programs at the behavioral level of those individuals, such as teachers and school administrators, actually implementing the programs.

Mr. Cronin's work has also focused on differential forms of cognitive processing evoked by different symbol systems, especially non-notational symbol systems encountered in artistic expression. This work has lead him to strongly endorse the importance of the arts in the typical school curriculum, since it can be argued that the arts develop forms of cognition and cognitive styles that are distinctly different from those developed from more traditional educational subjects. Lastly, his interests have also focused on the complementary nature of the information that can be obtained from combining qualitative with quantitative evaluation methods. This interest has stressed the different nature of the information resulting from each approach rather than the superiority of each research approach over the other.