简介

Sarah Roberts is an assistant professor of Mathematics Education. She received her B.A., M.A., and teaching credential from Stanford University and her Ph.D. from University of Colorado at Boulder. Prior to attending graduate school for her Ph.D., Dr. Roberts taught high school and middle school math and science for several years in the Bay Area. Dr. Roberts’ research attends to issues of equity in mathematics education. She focuses on two key areas: 1) working with and investigating secondary mathematics teachers’ practices in supporting English learners (ELs) in their mathematics classrooms; and 2) supporting preservice mathematics teachers to develop and grow ideas about equity in their teaching and learning. In her dissertation, Dr. Roberts studied middle school mathematics teachers’ professional development discussions around supporting ELs, focusing specifically on how teachers positioned and conceptualized supporting ELs in their mathematics instruction. Based on this graduate work, Dr. Roberts developed a research project devoted to working with mathematics teachers to provide their ELs equitable access to mathematics. She was awarded a Spencer Foundation grant to collect data in Spring 2012 in four teachers’ classrooms in a metropolitan district in Colorado with a high EL population. Her goal in this study was to investigate how exemplary secondary mathematics teachers supported ELs in developing skills and tools for inclusion in mathematics (“Big D”) Discourse communities (Gee, 1996) and how these teachers provided cognitively demanding mathematics experiences for all students.