The Robert B. Davis Institute for Learning
The Robert B. Davis Institute for Learning at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education
The Staff at the Robert B. Davis Institute for Learning
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Carolyn A. Maher, Professor II
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers University
Director of the Robert B. Davis Institute for Learning
carolyn.maher@gse.rutgers.eduCarolyn A. Maher is Professor II of Mathematics Education and the Director of the Robert B. Davis Institute for Learning at the Graduate School of Education, Rutgers. She is Editor of the Journal of Mathematical Behavior and has served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Research in Mathematics Education. Her research, consisting of both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, has focused on the development of mathematical ideas and mathematical reasoning in learners over time. Most noteworthy is the longitudinal study that followed the mathematical thinking of a cohort group of students doing mathematics in and out of classrooms, now in its 21st year and tracking the subjects as young professionals. This longitudinal study is featured in the Private Universe Project in Mathematics, a series of six video workshops for teacher professional development that was produced by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The documentary, Surprises in Mind, published by RiverRun Media, features her long-term study. Recent research includes a three-year study of middle school students' informal mathematics learning in an after-school setting in an urban NJ school district. With the current Discovery Research K-12 grant from National Science Foundation, Maher and colleagues are now focusing on teacher education and how studying video episodes of children's learning from prior research potentially can improve teachers' abilities to reason mathematically. This latest NSF research project builds upon her current REESE Synthesis grant that selected video episodes on children's mathematical reasoning as representative samples from prior studies for inclusion in a prototype of a searchable database accessible via the Internet. Professor Maher has published over 60 refereed journal articles and book chapters, and has given over 30 invited lectures, plenary sessions, and keynote addresses. She was invited co-chair of the Topic Study Group for "New Trends in Mathematics Education Research" at the Eleventh International Congress on Mathematics Education, held in July 2008. She gave the invited keynote lecture Critical Thinking Skills in Schools and Museums at the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies in June 2007. She was a plenary speaker at the 26th PME in Norwich, England, 2002, Senior Lecturer at the International Congress for Mathematics Education in Copenhagen, Denmark, 2004, and Plenary Speaker at the University of Helsinki Conference in Finland, 2004.
For Dr. Maher's full vita, click here
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Marjory F. Palius
Associate Director
marjory.palius@gse.rutgers.eduMarjory Palius is Associate Director of the Robert B. Davis Institute for Learning. She is a Co-Principal Investigator on the NSF-funded grant, Cyber-Enabled Design Research to Enhance Teachers' Critical Thinking Using a Major Video Collection. Her work spans development of the Video Mosaic Collaborative (VMC) and research on instructional interventions that use videos from the collection in teacher education studies. She works closely with Carolyn and Robert to develop content for the VMC, and oversees the efforts of research associates and graduate students who assist the team. Marjory also supports design of instructional interventions and oversees data collection from study sites. She leads efforts in coding of open-ended assessment data, including training of research assistants who engage with the coding work. She has co-authored papers on the VMC research and made presentations at national conferences.
Marjory also is a key member of the project team for the New Jersey Partnership for Excellence in Middle School Mathematics (NJ PEMSM), directed by Prof. Amy Cohen. Marjory serves as program advisor to cohorts of middle school teachers who have received fellowships from NJ PEMSM to take graduate courses at Rutgers GSE to strengthen their pedagogical content knowledge and conceptual understanding of the math content they teach. Marjory has collaborated with Carolyn, a Co-PI on this grant, on the design for one of the courses, which meets off-campus in a hybrid (part face-to-face and part online) format and engages participants in the VMC research.
In addition, Marjory has research interest in the role of communication among group members engaged in solving cognitively challenging mathematical tasks. Her dissertation uses discourse analysis to investigate how language constructs, and is shaped by, the process of mathematical problem solving. She is studying the discourse of secondary students working in small groups on mathematics problem solving to analyze ways in which their communication yields evidence of co-construction of mathematical ideas and reasoning.
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Robert Sigley
Researcher and Data Manager
robert.sigley@gse.rutgers.eduRobert's role at the Davis Institute is to preserve the video collection of the Davis Institute, create clips for use during our interventions and film and maintain a database about our interventions.
Robert is currently pursuing an Ph.D. in Mathematics Education at Rutgers University. His research interests include the role of technology in learning in the classroom.
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Alice S. Alston
Senior Researcher
alston@rci.rutgers.eduAlice S. Alston is currently a part-time faculty member of the Department of Learning and Teaching of the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University and a Research Associate at the Robert B. Davis Institute for Learning. Earlier professional experiences include teaching in both public and independent middle and secondary schools, and chairing a middle school mathematics department, before assuming a central staff role in both professional development and research projects of the Rutgers University Center for Mathematics, Science and Computer Education and the Robert B. Davis Institute of Learning from its inception. Subsequently, as a full-time faculty member, Dr. Alston regularly taught both graduate and undergraduate courses in mathematics education at the GSE as a Visiting Associate Professor in Mathematics Education and continues to actively advise graduate students in their research endeavors.
With a background in mathematics and experience teaching in middle and high school, her particular expertise in professional development is for teachers of grades 5 through 12 using a modified Lesson Study approach that is classroom-based and focuses on teachers’ deepening knowledge of the mathematics they are responsible for teaching and their ability to recognize and encourage their students mathematical reasoning. She has served as consultant for the Davis Institute in university-school partnership activities for professional development facilitating this model in a number of urban school districts in New Jersey.
Recent research interests include fine-grained studies of children’s mathematical reasoning, the implications of students affect on their mathematical behavior and analyses of teachers’ attention to their students’ mathematical reasoning within Lesson Study activities.
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Arthur B. Powell
Associate Director - Rutgers Newark Division
powellab@andromeda.rutgers.eduArthur B. Powell, Jr. is Associate Professor of Mathematics Education in the Department of Urban Education at the Newark campus of Rutgers University, New Jersey, and Faculty Research Scientist and Associate Director of the Robert B. Davis Institute for Learning of the Graduate School of Education in New Brunswick. He received his B.A. in mathematics and statistics from Hampshire College, Amherst, MA; M.A. in mathematics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; and Ph.D. in mathematics education from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick. His research interests focus in the following areas where he has published extensively: writing and mathematics learning; ethnomathematics; development of mathematical ideas, reasoning, and heuristics; teacher professional development in the mathematics for teaching; and collaborative problem solving in mathematics with technology. At present, he co-chairs SIG/Research in Mathematics Education of the American Educational Research Association. Also, he directs the Research Group on Communication, Technology, and Mathematics Learning that is engaged in an investigative and instructional project, called eMath. To fund his collaborative research, Dr. Powell has garnered funding from local, national, and international agencies.
In service to the mathematics education community, Dr. Powell is the co-author with Beatrice Lumpkin of Math: A Rich Heritage (1995); co-editor and co-author with Marilyn Frankenstein of Ethnomathematics Challenging Eurocentrism in Mathematics Education (1997); and co-author with Marcelo A. Bairral of A Escrita e o Pensamento Matemático: Interações e Potencialidades [Writing and Mathematical Thinking: Interactions and Potentialities] (2006); co-editor with Carolyn Maher and Elizabeth Uptegrove of Combinatorics and Reasoning: Representations, Justifying and Building Isomorphisms (2010); co-author with Brian Greer, Swapna Mukhopadhyay, and Sharon Nelson-Barber Culturally Responsive Mathematics Education (2009). Dr. Powell is currently on the editorial board of the Journal of Mathematical Behavior; Boletim GEPEM: O Boletim do Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisas em Educação Matemática [The Bulletin of the Study and Research Group in Mathematics Education, published in Brazil]; and BOLEMA: O Boletim de Educação Matemática [BOLEMA: The Bulletin of Mathematics Education, published in Brazil]. He is the past vice president of the International Study Group for Ethnomathematics and, with Marilyn Frankenstein and John Volmink, co-founder and co-editor of the Criticalmathematics Educator Newsletter. Moreover, he has forged international collaborations between mathematics educators at Rutgers University and those in the Southern Hemisphere—in Mozambique, South Africa, and Brazil—and in the Caribbean—in Haiti. In Haiti, last year, along with a graduate of Rutgers University-Newark, he developed a professional development project for teachers of elementary schools, focused on the materials and pedagogy developed and popularized by the Egyptian-born psychologist and mathematician, Caleb Gattegno.
In the United States, Dr. Powell works to further Gattegno’s ideas on the subordination of teaching to learning. In collaboration with a small group of other educators, in 2003, he co-founded the Bronx Charter School for Better Learning, where Gattegno’s approach to the teaching of reading, world languages, social studies, science, and mathematics are practiced and where he directs the professional development of teachers in mathematics.
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Judith H. Landis
Senior Researcher
jlandis19@yahoo.comJudith H. Landis is a Research Associate at the Robert B. Davis Institute for Learning at Rutgers University, and a part-time faculty member of the Rutgers Graduate School of Education. Her expertise is in mathematics education, with special attention to improving teaching and learning. Her extensive experience includes teaching mathematics at elementary, middle, high school, and university levels; teaching teachers in pre- and inservice environments, supervisor of mathematics, school principal, and assistant superintendent of schools
Dr. Landis currently works with teachers in several New Jersey school districts, as a component of two NSF funded research projects. The work with teachers makes use of a major video collection of children learning mathematics that is currently being prepared for storage at the Rutgers Repository. The professional development work involves helping teachers to build mathematics instruction that elicits students' reasoning and justification of solutions to problems.
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Patricia Crossley
Project Assistant
patcross@rci.rutgers.eduPat organizes and maintains the RBDIL and Hassler Whitney library at the GSE. She gives support to visiting scholars and assists researchers with locating data from our collection and lends general support to Institute projects.
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Kiranjeet Kaur Sran
Undergraduate Research Assistant
ksran@eden.rutgers.eduKiranjeet Kaur Sran is an undergraduate student in the School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program at Rutgers University. She plans to graduate in 2013 with a degree in Economics. With funding from NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Supplement, Kiran works on the Video Mosaic Project preparing materials for the Repository. In her free time, Kiran is a volunteer youth teacher in music and history at her local temple, as well as an assistant basketball coach for her town's recreational basketball league.
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Madeline Yedmen
Undergraduate Research Assistant
myedman@eden.rutgers.eduMadeline Yedman is currently an undergraduate student in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University majoring in Sociology. She plans on applying to the Graduate School of Education and becoming an Elementary and Special Education teacher. With funding from NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Supplement, Madeline works on the Video Mosaic Project preparing materials for the Repository.
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Sadhwvi Tripathy
Undergraduate Research Assistant
sadhwvi@eden.rutgers.eduSadhwvi Tripathy is currently an undergraduate student in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University majoring in Psychology. She is part of the 5-year Elementary Education with Preschool through Grade 3 Certification program, at the Graduate School or Education. With funding from NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Supplement, Sadhwvi works on the Video Mosaic Project preparing materials for the Repository.
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Josmary Adames
Undergraduate Research Assistant
joadames@eden.rutgers.eduJosmary Adames is currently an undergraduate student in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University majoring in English. She plans on applying to the Graduate School of Education and studying Elementary and Urban Education. With funding from NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Supplement, Josmary works on the Video Mosaic Project preparing materials for the Repository.
