Carolyn Cavanaugh Toft

Teaching Professor

Department of Psychology

Carolyn Cavanaugh Toft is a teaching professor in the Department of Psychology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Cavanaugh Toft has taught more than 16,000 students, primarily in large-enrollment psychology classes across the curriculum, ranging from first-year to senior students. She uses storytelling and examples from clinical practice to give students a sense of how people with different psychological disorders perceive the world.

In the last five years, Cavanaugh Toft has also supervised 119 students doing honors contracts in Barrett, The Honors College or served on honors thesis committees. Of these, more than 50 students completed honors contracts where they developed their critical thinking skills through an exercise researching and critically evaluating popularized psychological ideas. Other students completed projects that involved attending open support groups for friends or families of those with a particular psychological disorder, reviewing and critically analyzing the research on empirically validated treatments for that disorder and reflecting on the potential benefits and disadvantages of these support groups.

Cavanaugh Toft also founded Early Start: Psychology, an immersion course for incoming ASU students who hold one or more indicators of academic risk. Early Start students build connections with faculty in the Department of Psychology, including their future Introduction to Psychology instructors, other students and the greater ASU community. Data collected by The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences indicates that students who participate in Early Start are significantly more likely to persist in their education at ASU.

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