Emeriti
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Robert Floden
Email: floden@msu.edu
Robert Floden is former dean of the College of Education and an Emeritus University Distinguished Professor of teacher education, measurement and quantitative methods, mathematics education, educational psychology and educational policy. 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. He is part of both the Department of Teacher Education and the Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education (CEPSE). Floden is a member of the National Academy of Education, for which he serves as Secretary-Treasurer, and a fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). He is Chair of the Board of Directors for the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) and serves on the Boards of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) and the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP). He retired in Summer 2022.
Brin Keller
Email: brin@msu.edu
Brin Keller is an Emerita Associate Professor in PRIME. Her 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
Email: lappan@msu.edu
Glenda Lappan, retired in May 2014, is an Emerita 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
Email: mccrory@msu.edu
Raven McCrory, retired in August 2015, was an associate professor of teacher education with interests in teacher knowledge and teacher learning, particularly in mathematics and technology. Her research involved studying the mathematical education of teachers and exploring the knowledge needed for teaching K-12 mathematics. She was 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.
Ralph Putnam
Email: ralphp@msu.edu
Ralph Putnam is an Emeritus Associate Professor of Educational Psychology. He also served as the Graduate Director of the Mathematics Education doctoral program, and Director of PRIME. His 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. Ralph retired in Summer 2022.
Sharon Senk
Email: senk@msu.edu
Sharon Senk is a Professor Emerita in the Mathematics Department and the Program in Mathematics Education, retired in Spring 2015, but continued to work part time through Spring 2018. 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
Email: jsmith@msu.edu
John (Jack) P. Smith is an Emeritus 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.