Intro Psych Matters: The Next Edition of What Our Neighbors Need to Know
Who is Sue Frantz?
Sue Frantz is a first-generation college student who earned her BA in psychology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1989 and her MA in social psychology from the University of Kansas in 1992. She has been in love with sharing the concepts of psychology with her diverse student community since she began her teaching career as an adjunct professor at community colleges in the Kansas City area. Her main interest has been introducing the discipline to students in the Introduction to Psychology course. She is faculty emerita at Highline College in Des Moines, Washington, where she taught for over 20 years; and is affiliate faculty at New Mexico State University.
She has been active in the national psychology instruction community for many years. She served on the executive committee for the Society for the Teaching of Psychology for eight years, was elected as its 2019 president, and currently serves as its executive director. She scored Advanced Placement exams in psychology for 15 years.
Her gifted teaching was recognized early; she received the New Mexico State University-Alamogordo’s Teaching Excellence Award in 1998, in only her fourth year of her first full-time faculty position. In 2011, she won Washington State’s Ana Sue McNeill Assessment, Teaching and Learning Award. She was the inaugural recipient of the American Psychological Association’s Excellence in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at a Two-Year College or Campus Award in 2013, and won the Charles L. Brewer Distinguished Teaching of Psychology Award—APA’s highest honor for professors of psychology—in 2016. In 2026, she was named a Distinguished Member of Psi Chi.
She is co-author with Charles Stangor on Principles of Social Psychology version 3.0 and with Douglas Bernstein and Stephen Chew on Teaching Psychology: A Step-by-Step Guide, 4e, 2024.