Visiting Scholar From Down Under
Last week’s Wednesday morning Brown Bag Seminar featured a professor and researcher from Down Under. Dr. Katie Makar is Senior Lecturer in Mathematics Education at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Dr. Makar is currently on sabbatical, and at the Friday Institute as a visiting scholar for two weeks.
Dr. Makar’s research focuses on two areas: teachers' ongoing learning of inquiry-based teaching and students' informal inferential reasoning in statistics. She has received two nationally funded grants to understand teachers' experiences and the supports needed in shifting to inquiry-based practices over time.
Dr. Makar received her Ph. D. in Mathematics Education from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004: she was a student of our own Professor Jere Confrey. In 2007, she received the Early Career Award for Excellence in Research from the Mathematics Education Research Group of Australia. She was awarded tenure at the University of Queensland last year.
Her brown bag presentation was entitled "Inquiry-based Teaching in Mathematics and Statistics in Australian Primary Schools: Findings from a Four-year Research Study.”
Watch the video of Dr. Makar’s presentation and download the resources she shared at the Brown Bag Series Blog.