Rheta DeVries was the director of the Regents Center for Early Developmental Education and a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Northern Iowa from 1993 to 2009. She received her bachelor’s degree from Baylor University in 1957 before earning her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago in 1968. Throughout her career, she taught and served as a director at a variety of universities, high schools, and elementary schools.

From 1958 to 1961, DeVries was a classroom teacher in Illinois. She then attended the University of Chicago from 1962 to 1966, where she was a research assistant to psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. In 1968, she started working at the University of Illinois at Chicago, teaching in the Department of Human Development and Learning in the College of Education. While there, DeVries and her collaborator, Constance Kamii, began some of their earliest research into what they coined “constructivist education.” She took a sabbatical from the University of Chicago and was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. While in Switzerland, DeVries had the opportunity to sit in on Jean Piaget’s research group. From 1979 to 1980, DeVries was at the Merrill Palmer Institute in Detroit, Michigan, as a professor and Executive Director of Daycare Operations.

DeVries then spent the following 12 years (1981 to 1993) at the University of Houston, serving in different capacities including the Director of the Human Development Laboratory School; professor in the Department of Human Development and Consumer Sciences; and was the Director of the Summer Institute on Constructivist Education on four separate occasions. Based on her work at Houston, faculty started a constructivist charter school.

In 1993, DeVries began her career at the University of Northern Iowa, serving as a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction as well as the Director of the Regents’ Center for Early Developmental Education. She also established the Freeburg Early Childhood Program, a laboratory school program based on constructivist education which aimed to model childhood education best practices at a national level.

Over the course of her career, DeVries conducted research related to children and education. Areas of research included children’s conceptions of shadow phenomena, developmental levels in young children’s game playing, Piagetian measures of intelligence, and the effects of classroom socio-moral atmosphere.

Along with collaborator Constance Kamii, DeVries co-authored the books Physical Knowledge in Preschool Education: Implications of Piaget’s Theory (1978) and Group Games in Early Education: Implications of Piaget’s Theory (1980). DeVries and Betty Zan co-authored, and were recognized for, their work and book Moral Classrooms, Moral Children: Creating a Constructivist Atmosphere in Early Education (1994).

DeVries received numerous accolades over the course of her career, including: Outstanding Faculty Research Award (College of Technology at the University of Houston); the Early Childhood and Parent Education Distinguished Service Award (Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education); and the College of Education Faculty Award for Excellence in Research and Scholarship (University of Northern Iowa). She was additionally recognized for her research and publications when she was named an Iowa Academy of Education charter member in 1996.

DeVries died on May 28, 2012.