Faculty and Postdocs in the Mathematics Education Program

Tonya Bartell
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison
Department of Teacher Education, 116N Erickson Hall, (517) 432-4652
tbartell@msu.edu

Tonya Gau Bartell is an assistant professor of mathematics education interested in exploring teaching practices that promote mathematics learning for all students. Her research focuses on issues of culture, race, and power in mathematics teaching and learning, with particular attention to teachers’ development of mathematics pedagogy for social justice and pedagogy integrating a focus on mathematics, children’s mathematical thinking, and children’s community and cultural knowledge.

Kristen Bieda
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison

Kristen Bieda is an assistant professor of mathematics education. Her research focuses on classroom practices related to reasoning and proof in middle grades and secondary mathematics, with the goal of informing teacher education, curriculum, and professional development programs. Other interests include the use of lesson study in teacher preparation and the development of pre-service teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching through the use of curriculum as well as video-based representations of teaching.

Gail Burrill

Gail Burrill was a secondary teacher and department chair in suburban Milwaukee, Wisconsin for over 28 years. She is currently a Mathematics Specialist in the Program in Mathematics Education at Michigan State University. She served as President of the National Council of Teacher of Mathematics (NCTM), and as Director of the Mathematical Sciences Education Board. She co-directs the Institute for Advanced Study’s International Seminar and the Secondary School Teachers Program component of the Park City Mathematics Institute. Burrill is an instructor for Teachers Teaching with Technology and a senior mathematics advisor to Texas Instruments Education Technology. She received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching Mathematics, an honorary doctorate from Rose Holman Institute of Technology and the NCTM Lifetime Achievement Award. Her research interests are statistics education, the use of technology in teaching secondary mathematics, and issues related to what it means to teach mathematics. The author of numerous books and articles on statistics and mathematics education, she has spoken nationally and internationally on issues in teaching and learning mathematics.

Sandra Crespo

Sandra Crespo is an associate professor of teacher education interested in exploring learning environments and teaching practices that promote mathematical inquiry. Her research has focused primarily on preservice elementary teachers and their development as learners of mathematics and mathematics teaching. She also explores teacher groups as contexts for teacher learning and for improving the field experiences of teacher education students. Her work crosses multiple boundaries as she conducts research in the U.S., Canada, and the Dominican Republic. In the latter, she has been part of a curriculum reform team studying the effects of the mathematics texts the team developed for the country’s elementary and middle school grades.

Higinio Dominguez

A faculty member in mathematics education, Higinio Dominguez is interested in studying the reciprocal process of teachers noticing student actions and students noticing teacher actions in classrooms that include bilingual, English learners and recent immigrant students. He is currently conducting classroom-based investigations that focus on how the process of noticing influences Latino/a bilingual students’ discursive presence in mathematics. His research has been published in various journals, including Educational Studies in Mathematics, Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, and Bilingual Research Journal.

Corey Drake

Corey Drake serves as director of teacher education. Her work focuses on the preparation of elementary teachers to teach mathematics in diverse contexts. Her current research includes studies of pre-service elementary teachers’ learning from and about the use of mathematics curriculum materials. She also conducts a multi-university investigation of the ways in which elementary mathematics methods courses can be redesigned to support pre-service teachers in learning to integrate children’s mathematical thinking with children’s home and community-based mathematical understandings.

 

Robert Floden

Ph.D., Stanford University

Department of Teacher Education, 201D Erickson Hall, (517) 355-3486
floden@msu.edu
http://floden.wiki.educ.msu.edu/

Robert Floden is a University Distinguished Professor of teacher education, measurement and quantitative methods, educational psychology, and educational policy. He is associate dean for research, director of the Institute for Research on Teaching and Learning, co-director of the Education Policy Center and co-director of a pre-doctoral training program in the economics of education. He has studied teacher education and other influences on teaching and learning, including work on the cultures of teaching, teacher development, the character and effects of teacher education and how policy is linked to classroom practice. His current research focuses on secondary school algebra teaching. He is a member of the National Academy of Education.

 

Beth Herbel-Eisenmann

Ph.D., Michigan State University

Department of Teacher Education, 316 Erickson Hall, (517) 432-9607
bhe@msu.edu
https://www.msu.edu/~bhe/

Beth Herbel-Eisenmann is an associate professor of teacher education. Her research interests include bringing a discourse perspective to the study of written, enacted, and hidden curriculum in mathematics classrooms. She is interested not only in interrogating the norms that are embedded in and carried by teacher and textbook discourse patterns, but dedicated to understanding how these patterns may impact diverse students in mathematics classrooms, especially in terms of their mathematical understanding, dispositions and epistemology.

 

Brin Keller
Ph.D., Western Michigan University

Department of Mathematics, D215 Wells Hall, (517) 353-8490
brin@msu.edu
www.math.msu.edu/~brin/

Brin Keller is an Associate Professor in the Mathematics Department. Her current research focuses on exploring methods for developing students’ understanding and use of symbols in advanced mathematics – in particular, examining the effects of hands-on contextualized experiments in technology-rich environments on students’ symbolic thinking and preferences for representations of functions. Her work also addresses the development and evaluation of curriculum materials for pre-calculus and calculus classrooms. Brin has most recently worked as a curriculum and software developer for the Core-Plus Mathematics project.

 

Glenda Lappan
Ed.D., University of Georgia

Program in Mathematics Education, C718 Wells Hall, (517) 353-4657
glappan@math.msu.edu

Glenda Lappan is a University Distinguished Professor in the Program in Mathematics Education. Her research and development interests are in the connected areas of students’ learning of mathematics and mathematics teachers’ professional growth and change at the middle and secondary levels. She is also a co-author of the Connected Mathematics Project and Co-director for the Center for the Study of Mathematics Curriculum (CSMC).

 

Raven McCrory
Ph.D., University of Michigan

Department of Teacher Education, 114B Erickson Hall, (517) 353-8565
mccrory@msu.edu

www.msu.edu/user/mccrory

Raven McCrory is an associate professor of teacher education with interests in teacher knowledge and teacher learning, particularly in mathematics and technology. Her research involves studying the mathematical education of teachers and exploring the knowledge needed for teaching K-12 mathematics. She is also interested in understanding the impact of textbooks on opportunities to learn; how teachers use resources including textbooks and digital technologies in their teaching; and how people teach and learn online.

 

Vincent Melfi

Ph.D., University of Michigan

Department of Statistics and Probability, C421 Wells, (517) 432-3384

Program in Mathematics Education, 210 North Kedzie, (517) 884-3475

melfi@stt.msu.edu

Vince Melfi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and Probability and the Program in Mathematics Education (PRIME) at Michigan State University. He is also the Graduate Director of the Mathematics Education doctoral program, and Director of PRIME. His research interests include quantitative literacy, statistics education, and adaptive designs in clinical trials. He is a co-investigator on the Realizing the Vision: Quantitative Literacy project.

 

Elizabeth Phillips
Master, University of Notre Dame
Program in Mathematics Education, C717 Wells Hall, (517) 353-3835

ephillips@math.msu.edu

Betty Phillips is a senior academic specialist in the Program in Mathematics Education. She is interested in curriculum and professional development projects at the middle school and high school levels, as well as projects related to the teaching and learning of algebra across the grades. She is also a co-author of the Connected Mathematics Project.

 

Ralph Putnam
Ph.D., Stanford University

Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Special Education, 511 Erickson, (517) 353-9285
ralphp@msu.edu

Ralph Putnam is an associate professor of educational psychology whose research focuses on the cognitively oriented study of classroom teaching and learning and role of technology in learning. His recent research has examined the teaching and learning of mathematics in elementary school classrooms, especially the knowledge and beliefs of teachers as they teach mathematics for understanding and the different ways that students learn about mathematics from various kinds of instruction.

 

Sharon Senk
Ph.D., University of Chicago

Department of Mathematics, D320 Wells, (517) 353-4691

Sharon Senk is a Professor in the Mathematics Department and the Program in Mathematics Education. Her primary research interests are the learning and teaching of secondary school mathematics, the nature of assessment in high school mathematics classrooms, and the mathematical preparation of elementary and secondary teachers.  She currently is the Principal Investigator (PI) of a Collaborative Research Project with Yukiko Maeda and Jill Newton at Purdue University called Preparing to Teach Algebra: A Study of Teacher Education. She also serves as Co-PI of the Teacher Education Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M) and as a Consultant on Evaluation to the Secondary Component of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project (UCSMP).

Jack Smith
Ph.D., University of California-Berkeley

John (Jack) P. Smith is a professor of educational psychology. His research concerns the nature of people’s knowledge and learning of mathematics as evidenced in school and other settings. His other interests include the relation of epistemology to learning, the role of intuitive understanding in learning mathematics and science, the design of advanced technology for learning mathematics, and the nature of teaching mathematics.

Michael Steele
Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh

Michael Steele is an assistant professor of mathematics education. His research focuses on knowledge needed for teaching mathematics, and the development of that knowledge in preservice and practicing teachers. His other interests include practice-based teacher education and professional development, the use of cases in teacher education, middle grades mathematics teaching and learning, and the use of technology in teaching and teacher education.

Michael Weiss
Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Program in Mathematics Education and Teacher Education, 223 North Kedzie, (517) 884-3478
mweiss@msu.edu

Michael Weiss is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education and the Program in Mathematics Education (PRIME). With a background in both pure mathematics and education research, and experience as a high school mathematics teacher. Michael’s research focuses on the capacity of elementary and secondary mathematics education to faithfully represent authentic mathematical values and practices, and the extent to which school mathematics can cultivate a mathematical sensibility in students. In his work, Michael has analyzed narratives of mathematical practice to identify a network of dispositions that mathematicians draw upon to value and guide their work, and has used these dispositions both as a theoretical frame for studies of teaching and learning, and to generative models of possible classroom practice. He teaches both content and methods courses for elementary and secondary mathematics teachers. Michael received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 2009 and served on the faculty of Oakland University from 2009-2012.

Suzanne Wilson
Ph.D., Stanford University

Suzanne Wilson is a University Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Teacher Education and director of the College of Education’s Center for the Scholarship of Teaching. Her work spans several domains, including teacher learning, teacher knowledge, and the connection between educational policy and teachers’ practice. She has conducted research on history and mathematics teaching and has reviewed the literature on teacher professional development and teacher education. Her current work focuses on developing sound measures for tracking what teachers learn in teacher preparation, induction, and professional development programs.

Postdoctoral Research Fellows in Mathematics Education at MSU

Lindsay Keazer
Ph.D., Purdue University
LANDSCAPE Research Project, 245 Erickson Hall
keazer@msu.edu

Lindsay is a postdoctoral Research Associate working on the NSF-funded project “Learning About New Demands in Schools: Considering Algebra Policy Environments” (LANDSCAPE). This project, led by PI’s Beth Herbel-Eisenmann and Mike Steele of Michigan State University, and Janine Remillard at the University of Pennsylvania, is aimed at investigating how school districts across the nation currently organize, structure, and support the teaching and learning of algebra. Lindsay is involved in the data collection, analysis, and writing of a nationwide quantitative survey followed by twelve case studies of districts in four regions.
Lindsay completed her Ph.D. at Purdue University in Mathematics Education in May of 2012. Her dissertation research studied secondary mathematics teachers’ experiences as they attempted to align their teaching with national recommendations for increasing students’ engagement in reasoning and sense making. She continues to be interested in studying teacher professional development that supports autonomous and democratic teacher change.

Mariana Levin
Ph.D.,  University of California, Berkeley

Mari recently completed her Ph.D., and is now serving in a postdoctoral position in mathematics education at Michigan State University, mentored by Bob Floden and Glenda Lappan. Her research interests include mathematical problem solving and learning. Mari’s dissertation research involved modeling the co-development of conceptual and procedural knowledge in problem solving.

Milos Savic
Ph.D., New Mexico State University
Program in Mathematics Education, 224A North Kedzie, (517) 884-3479
savic@msu.edu
http://www.milossavic.com

Milos completed his Ph.D. in mathematics, with a specialty in mathematics education, in August 2012. He is now serving in a postdoctoral position at MSU, working with the CREATE for STEM Institute and the Mathematics Department. His research interests include proof, students’ and mathematicians’ proving, logic, technology, and the effect of technology on middle school students’ mathematical concept development.