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Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff
James W. Pellegrino (Chair) is liberal arts and sciences distinguished professor of cognitive psychology and distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research and development interests focus on children’s and adult’s thinking and learning and the implications of cognitive research and theory for assessment and instructional practice. Recently he served as cochair of the National Research Council’s Committee on the Foundations of Assessment, which issued the report Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment. From 1973 to 1979 he was professor of psychology and a research associate of the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center. From 1979 to 1989 he was professor of education and psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he also served as chair of the Department of Education. From 1989 to 2001 he was the Frank W. Mayborn professor of cognitive studies at Vanderbilt University, where he also served as codirector of the Learning Technology Center and as dean of Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development. He has a B.A. from Colgate University with a major in psychology and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in experimental and cognitive psychology from the University of Colorado.
John R. Anderson is professor of psychology and computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. His current research involves the acquisition of cognitive skills and the understanding of how human cognition is adapted to the information processing demands of the environment. He has developed the ACT-R production system and applied it to various domains of memory, problem solving, and visual information processing.
He has published widely on human associative memory, language, memory, cognition, and the adaptive character of thought. He has a Ph.D. from Stanford University.
Deborah Loewenberg Ball is a professor of educational studies at the University of Michigan. Her work as a researcher and teacher educator draws directly and indirectly on her long experience as an elementary classroom teacher. With elementary school mathematics as the main context for the work, Ball studies instruction, professional education, and teacher learning. Her work also examines efforts to improve teaching through policy, reform initiatives, and teacher education. Ball’s publications include articles on teacher learning and teacher education, the role of subject-matter knowledge in teaching and learning to teach, endemic challenges of teaching, and the relations of policy and practice in instructional reform. She is a member of the National Research Council’s Mathematical Science Education Board and its Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, and she recently served as a member of the Glenn Commission. Ball has a Ph.D. from Michigan State University.
Jill Harrison Berg is a national board certified teacher on sabbatical from Cambridge Public Schools while serving as a doctoral fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Education. Her research interest is improving teacher practice and student learning through reflection. Her work in teacher education extends from giving workshops for pre-service teachers, consulting with school teams about implementation of best practices, presenting workshops at local and national conferences, to supporting teacher candidates for national board certification. She is committed to supporting work that recognizes the importance of the practitioner’s perspective in developing educational endeavors and has collaborated on special projects with many organizations, including Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), Project Zero, WGBH, UNICEF, TERC investigations, and the Massachusetts Department of Education. She is the author of a book on improving the quality of teaching through national board certification.
Susan Carey recently joined Harvard University as a professor of psychology. Previously she was a professor of psychology at
New York University. Her major interests include infant cognition, cognitive development, and conceptual change in childhood. Her research concerns the evolutionary and ontogenetic origins of human knowledge in a variety of domains: number, lexical semantics, physical reasoning, and reasoning about intentional states. Carey is affiliated with the Society for Research in Child Development, the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and the International Society for Infancy Studies. She has received several fellowships and honors, including the Guggenheim, 1999; the Nicod prize (Paris, 1998); the George A. Miller Lecturer (Society for Cognitive Neuroscience, 1998); a Cattell fellowship; and a Fulbright fellowship. She has a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Stephen J. Ceci holds a lifetime endowed chair in developmental psychology at Cornell University. He studies the development of intelligence and memory and is the author of approximately 300 articles, books, and chapters. Ceci’s past honors and scientific awards include a senior Fulbright-Hayes fellowship and a research career scientist award from the National Institutes of Health. An article he published in Psychological Bulletin was awarded the 1994 Robert Chin prize from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues for the best article, and it was named one of the top 20 articles in 1994 by Hertzig & Farber. Ceci has received the IBM supercomputing prize, three senior Mensa Foundation research prizes, and the Arthur Rickter award for his work on children’s testimony. He currently serves on seven editorial boards. The American Academy of Forensic Psychology gave Ceci its lifetime distinguished contribution award for 2000, and the American Psychological Association announced he is the recipient of its 2002 lifetime distinguished contribution award for science and society. He recently completed a three-year term on the American Psychological Society’s board of directors. Ceci is the coeditor of the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, which is partnered with Scientific American. He is a current member of the advisory committee to the National Science Foundation’s Social, Behavioral, and Economics Sciences Directorate and recipient of the American Psychological Association’s 2003 award for lifetime contribution to the application of psychology. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Americal Psy-
chological Association, and the American Psychological Society. He has a B.A. from the University of Delaware, an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Exeter, England.
Mary Ellen Dakin is a secondary school English teacher at Revere High School in Revere, Massachusetts. She has taught in both private and a public school settings since 1987. In 1994, she attended the Teaching Shakespeare Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and since then she has presented workshops on the topic of teaching Shakespeare through performance at regional and national conventions. Her writing has been published in Shakespeare Magazine and in the Harvard Educational Review. She is a member of the Massachusetts Department of Education’s assessment development committee. In 1999, she earned certification in adult/young adult English language arts from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and holds the title of master teacher from the Massachusetts Department of Education.
M. Suzanne Donovan (Study Director) is director of the SERP project and a senior program officer at the National Research Council’s Division on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. She is currently study director for a project that will produce a volume on How People Learn targeted to teachers. She was co-editor of the NRC reports How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice, Minority Students in Special and Gifted Education, and Eager to Learn: Educating Our Preschoolers. She has a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley School of Public Policy, and was previously on the faculty of Columbia University’s School of Public and International Affairs.
Barbara Foorman is professor and director of the Center for Academic and Reading Skills at the University of Texas-Houston Medical School. Her work has focused on reading acquisition and the role of instruction. She is currently principal investigator of a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for the study of early interventions for children with reading problems in schools in Houston and Washington, D.C. She has a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, School of Education.
Walter Kintsch is professor of psychology and director of the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado in Boulder. His research focus has been on the study of how people understand language, using both experimental and computational modeling techniques. His current research involves latent semantic analysis, formulating a psychological semantics based on it. Kintsch has received the distinguished scientific contribution award of the American Psychological Association. He has been chair of the governing boards of the Cognitive Science Society and the Psychonomic Society and president of Division 3 of the American Psychological Association. Kintsch has a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Kansas.
Robert A. Morse has been a teacher of physics at St. Albans School in Washington, DC. since 1982. He is an active member of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) including being a physics teaching resource agent (PTRA), a workshop presenter to teachers in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia area private and public schools, and nationally at AAPT meetings and PTRA training sessions. He was a participant in the National Research Council conference How People Learn in 1998. He received the presidential award for excellence in science teaching in 1988. He has a Ph.D. in science education from the University of Maryland at College Park.
Sharon Robinson is president of the Educational Policy Leadership Institute of the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and heads the public policy arm of the company. In this role, she serves as the primary voice for ETS in the national dialogue surrounding education and education reform. Previously she was the ETS executive vice president for external affairs, public policy, and research. Before joining ETS, Robinson was assistant secretary of education in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement. She also held a variety of leadership positions at the National Education Association, including director of the National Center for Innovation, its research and development arm. A lifelong civil rights activist, Robinson has waged a personal crusade to convince educators of the economic necessity and ethical responsibility to develop strategies for educating and maximizing the potential of minority and disabled students in rural areas and inner-city districts. Robinson has B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees, the latter in educa-
tional administration and supervision, from the University of Kentucky. She recently completed the renowned Harvard Business School Advanced Management Program.
Jon Saphier is the founder and president of Research for Better Teaching (RBT), an educational consulting and training organization in Carlisle, Massachusetts, that works with over 100 school districts annually on long-term projects for improving instruction and student learning. A former classroom teacher, staff developer, and administrator, Saphier has developed courses and materials for educators that build on findings from cognitive science and developmental psychology. He is the author of six books and numerous articles dealing with pedagogy, supervision, and school culture. He is also founder and chairman of Teachers 21, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the professionalization of teaching. Teachers 21 focuses on influencing public policy and legislation related to the conditions of teaching and does extensive staff development work with a special focus on beginning teacher induction programs.
Leona Schauble is a professor of education at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests include the relations between everyday reasoning and more formal, culturally supported, and schooled forms of thinking, such as scientific and mathematical reasoning. Her research focuses on such topics as belief change in contexts of scientific experimentation, everyday reasoning, causal inference, and the origins and development of model-based reasoning. Prior to her work at Vanderbilt, she worked at the University of Wisconsin, the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Children’s Television Workshop in New York. Schauble has a Ph.D. in developmental and educational psychology from Columbia University.
Joseph K. Torgesen, is the Robert M. Gagne professor of psychology and education at Florida State University. His research interests include the psychology of reading and prevention of reading disabilities, cognitive characteristics of children with learning disabilities, assessment practices with children, and computer-assisted instruction in basic academic skills. He is the author or coauthor of over 150 books, book chapters, papers, and tests in these areas. He has been active in numerous profes-
sional organizations including as a member of the Learning Disabilities Planning Group, Office of Special Education Programs, U.S. Office of Education; a member of the professional advisory board of the National Center for Learning Disabilities; and a member of the scientific advisory board of the International Dyslexia Association. He has a Ph.D. in developmental and clinical psychology from the University of Michigan.
Alexandra K. Wigdor served as the first director of the National Research Council’s SERP project. An NRC staff member since 1978, she most recently held the position of deputy director of the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education with special responsibility for developing the education program. Among the notable NRC reports on improving education produced that grew out of that program are Improving Student Learning: A Strategic Plan for Education Research and Its Utilization (1999); Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (1998); How People Learn: Mind, Brain, Experience, and School (1999); How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice; Making Money Matter: Financing America’s Schools (1999), and Eager to Learn: Educating Our Preschoolers (2000).
Mark R. Wilson is a professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on educational measurement, item response modeling, and assessment design. His research interests include the incorporation of cognitive modeling perspectives into psychometric models. He has recently concluded a project to develop the BEAR Assessment System, which coordinates assessment information between embedded classroom tasks and more traditional testing methods, in order to better support classroom instruction and educational accountability. He is a founding editor of the journal Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research and Perspectives. He is a member of the Joint Committee for Standards in Educational Evaluation. He has a Ph.D. in measurement and educational statistics from the University of Chicago.
Suzanne M. Wilson is a professor of teacher education at the Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University, and also directs the university’s College of Education Center for the Scholarship of Teaching. She is also a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Her
areas of expertise include curriculum policy, the history of teachers and teaching, mathematics reform, teacher assessment, teacher education and learning, and teaching history. An educational psychologist with an interest in teacher learning and teacher knowledge, her studies include investigating the capacities and commitments of exemplary secondary school history and mathematics teachers and she has written extensively on the knowledge base of teaching. She is the author of a recent book based on a longitudinal study of the relationship between educational policy and teaching practice in California. Wilson has a Ph.D. from Stanford University.