Molly Fisher
Rowan University, NJ·Education Research
Good math teachers notice what children are thinking. They pay attention to students' strategies, interpret what those strategies show, and decide how to respond.
- Fields
Education Research
Computer Science
- Topics
professional noticing
mathematics education
teacher education
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Test whether generative AI tools given rubrics and exemplars can score teachers' professional noticing responses in line with expert human raters, across the components of attending, interpreting and deciding.
- Assess how consistent AI scores are across three noticing assessments of different format and complexity, two video-based and one vignette-based, given to about 150 elementary teachers.
- Identify which prompt engineering and model training approaches produce the most reliable automated scoring, through structured, iterative testing.
- Examine how preservice and inservice teachers perceive and act on AI-generated feedback reports, using surveys and semi-structured cognitive interviews.
More about the research
This skill, called professional noticing, is a foundation of effective teaching. Measuring it is slow, though, because human experts must score each teacher's responses. As a result, teachers rarely get timely feedback. This collaborative project asks whether generative AI tools can score noticing reliably and give feedback that teachers actually find useful.
Why it matters
If AI scoring proves trustworthy, teacher preparation programs and schools could give elementary math teachers faster, more frequent feedback on how they read children's thinking. The project also aims to show when automated evaluation of teaching can be trusted and when human judgment remains essential.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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Southern Methodist University, TX·Education Research
Develop two practice formats for preservice science teachers, AI-driven virtual reality avatar simulations and scaffolded peer teaching, to build skill in leading discussions of real-world scientific problems.
Karen Hollebrands
North Carolina State University, NC·Education Research
Create online modules with high-demand geometry tasks, video cases and grades 6–12 student work that prepare future teachers to lead productive discussions using web-based dynamic geometry tools.
Wendy Smith
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, NE·Education Research
Examine how networked improvement communities in the MTEP 2.0 network support, accelerate and sustain changes to secondary mathematics teacher preparation programs, using annual interviews with representative case studies.
The school
Rowan University: 7 labs on PI Pages, $64M a year on research, 69 research doctorates a year.
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