Susan B. Empson is a professor in the department of Learning, Teaching, and Curriculum and the Richard Miller endowed chair of mathematics education at the University of Missouri. She and Vicki Jacobs are currently collaborating on a National Science Foundation research grant to study elementary teachers’ learning and development centered on teaching in ways that are responsive to children’s mathematical thinking in the domain of rational numbers. Her research on children’s thinking about fractions is the topic of her 2011 book, Extending Children’s Mathematics: Fractions and Decimals (co-author, Linda Levi) and she has published widely in refereed journals, including Cognition and Instruction, Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, Educational Studies in Mathematics, Teaching Children Mathematics, and Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education. She has been a researcher of Cognitively Guided Instruction since 1989 and is a co-author of Children’s Mathematics: Cognitively Guided Instruction (1^st and 2^nd editions). She earned her PhD in Mathematics Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and before moving to Mizzou spent 20 years on the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin. Before going back to graduate school, she was a high school mathematics teacher in New York City and in the Peace Corps, in Morocco.

Affiliations

Areas of Expertise

• Mathematics teaching
• Children’s mathematical thinking
• Mathematics teacher learning
• Professional development for teachers