Dana Miller-Cotto is an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Education. She earned her PhD in Education from Temple University and her MEd from Temple University.
Dr. Miller-Cotto has used approaches from cognitive science, sociology, and educational psychology to study predictors of educational inequity, particularly as they relate to marginalized students learning math. A significant portion of her research focuses on individual differences in math performance for Black and Latine students living in poverty who generally demonstrate lower performance in mathematics in...
Associate Professor, Learning Sciences & STEM EducationAffiliate, UCB Center for Race & Gender Affiliate, UCB Asian American Research Center
Research
Dr. Sengupta-Irving’s research explores the sociocultural, disciplinary, and political dimensions of children’s mathematics learning. Broadly, her work asks a deceptively simple question: What, in addition to mathematics, do children learn when they learn mathematics? Dr. Sengupta-Irving works closely with teachers to understand and design pedagogical...
Zoe Silverman is a doctoral candidate in Learning Sciences & Human Development at UC Berkeley. Her research engages video-based interaction analyses of talk, gaze, gesture, touch, space, and movement during facilitated education programs to illuminate how participants — both human and non-human — collaborate to do hands-on learning with objects in museums.
Zoe worked for more than a decade as an education specialist and program coordinator at a variety of arts and cultural institutions in Boston and Los Angeles. In previous lives, she was a high school social studies teacher and...
Ken Singer is a grad student in the Learning Sciences. A stubborn and rebellious child of educators and entrepreneurs, he started his career as a tech entrepreneur and then transitioned into higher ed, proving once again that despite all efforts, some of us become our parents. Ken has spent his teaching career trying to reach innovators and risk-takers, finding that many resist or reject traditional forms of instruction. As a result, he co-created new pedagogies to help non-traditional learners, across cultures, access entrepreneurial knowledge and develop entrepreneurial mindsets and...
Thomas M. Philip is a Professor in the Berkeley School of Education, where he also serves as the Faculty Director of the Berkeley Teacher Education Program. He studies how ideology shapes learning and how learning is a site of ideological contestation and becoming. As a learning scientist and teacher educator, he is interested in how teachers make sense of power and hierarchy, and act on their sense of agency as they navigate and ultimately transform classrooms and institutions toward more equitable, just, and democratic practices and outcomes. His scholarship also explores...
Zohal is a doctoral student in Berkeley's Learning Sciences and Human Development program. She fervently believes in including learners, practitioners, and community voices in research design and development. Through a collaborative approach, she aspires to understand how youth develop critical data and digital literacies through social and civic online engagement.
Most recently, Zohal was listed as a member of the 30 under 30 cohort for 2023 in learning leadership by the Learning Guild. Zohal has also supported research at Digital Promise, the Learning, Innovation, and Technology...
Michael Ranney's research explores the nature of explanation and understanding, in both formal and informal domains. His work is intended to foster the incorporation of challenging information (e.g., on global climate change; see the website for HowGlobalWarmingWorks.org). Regarding explanatory coherence, he, his students and his collaborators study and model the nature and utility of reasoning involving both supportive and contradictory relations. They also generate curricula, methods, and artificially intelligent software...
Elliot Turiel teaches courses on human development and its relation to education. He holds the Jerome A. Hutto Chair in the School of Education, and is an affiliated professor in the Department of Psychology. He has served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs ad Interim Dean in the School of Education. He has served as president of the Jean Piaget Society. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a National Institute of Mental Health Fellow, and is a member of the National Academy of Education. In 2021 he recieved the Distinguished Contributions to Developemental Science Award, from the Jean...
Merging my graduate degree training in developmental psychology (PhD, 2002) and in applied linguistics (PhD, 2004), I have developed a research program that is centrally concerned with the role of language and literacy practices in children’s development and education.
As a developmental psychologist, I have always been interested in discerning the sociocultural underpinnings of learning processes. The cognitive capabilities that our neurological apparatus enables us as human beings to attain do not pre-exist and are never abstracted from the social practices in which they develop...
Dor Abrahamson researches mathematics learning and teaching. He develops and evaluates theoretical models of these processes by analyzing empirical data collected during implementations of his innovative pedagogical design. Drawing on embodiment and sociocultural paradigms, Abrahamson is particularly interested in modeling how learners coordinate between intuitive and formal views on situated phenomena and what roles teachers play in ushering these coordinations. Abrahamson’s analyses of pedagogical interactions focus on student and...
