Karen King

Professional Title
Program Director
About Me (Bio)
Karen D. King is transitioning to become Program Director at the National Science Foundation in the Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings in the Education and Human Resources Directorate. She most recently served as Director of Research for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the largest professional association of mathematics teachers in the world, serving the US and Canada. King’s current research focuses on urban mathematics reform, the mathematics preparation of elementary and secondary teachers, and the policies of mathematics teacher professional development. She has been the principal investigator or co-principal investigator of National Science Foundation funded grants totaling over $2,000,000 and recently co-edited book titled Disrupting Tradition: Research and Practice Pathways in Mathematics Education with William Tate, IV and Celia Rousseau Anderson. She also serves as part of the writing team for the revision of The Mathematical Education of Teachers, which describes the mathematics teachers need to know and be able to do to be successful in light of the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics.

King has served as associate editor of the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education and was a member of the RAND Mathematics Study Panel, which made recommendations to the U.S. Department of Education about future research funding in mathematics education. She received a Ph.D. in 1997 at the University of Maryland, where she conducted research on mathematics teacher thinking. She also serves on numerous committees focusing on research in mathematics education and teacher education with national organizations.
Keywords
Michigan State University (MSU)
09/01/2014

This project involves designing, facilitating, and studying professional development (PD) to support equitable mathematics education. The PD will involve grades 4-8 mathematics teachers across three sites to support the design of a two-week institute focused on enhancing access and agency in relationship to important math practices, followed by ongoing interactions for the math teachers to engage in systematic inquiry of their practice over time to facilitate equitable mathematics teaching and learning in their classrooms.

Virginia State University Foundation
09/15/2016

This project will scale up, implement, and assess the efficacy of interventions in K-12 mathematics education based on the well-established Algebra Project (AP) pedagogical framework, which seeks to improve performance and participation in mathematics of students in distressed school districts, particularly low-income students from underserved populations.

University of Colorado Boulder
07/01/2015

This study will examine the impact of the Learning and Teaching Geometry (LTG) professional development for secondary mathematics teachers on the teachers' knowledge and classroom instruction, as well as on their students' learning. As the nation invests vast resources in the professional development of teachers to meet new curriculum and instruction challenges, exploring the efficacy of professional development is important to understand how best to direct those resources.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
09/01/2015

The infrastructure to improve mathematics education in the US requires building human resources in mathematics and mathematics education into a professional community that can respond to the critical needs in the field. This project seeks to build a professional community with shared understanding of the specialized content knowledge (SCK) - the special forms and ways of reasoning about mathematical knowledge used in teaching (MKT). 

Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI)
04/01/2015

This project will convene two workshops, held in 2015 and 2016, which will focus on developmental mathematics and other critical issues in mathematics education. The workshop will frame critical issues; draw attention to issues of diverse participation and success in mathematics; and provide images of productive engagement for participants to draw upon as they return to their professional communities.

University of Pennsylvania (Penn)
09/01/2018

This grant is also known as The Responsive Math Teaching Project: Developing Instructional Leadership in a Network of Elementary Schools.

The goal of this project is to build instructional leadership capacity in teachers and school-based leaders in a network of underperforming elementary schools with limited resources. Through design-based improvement research, the project is designed to enhance the knowledge, skills, and competencies of elementary teacher leaders and principals to develop a shared vision and provide ongoing support of high-quality math instruction.

University of Chicago (U of C)
03/01/2013

The main goal of this mathematics education research project is to determine through experimentation specific teaching strategies that can be used to support middle school students in drawing connections between mathematical representations (fractions and ratios). The potential instructional strategies were identified from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) video analyses study as the ones that best distinguished high performing countries from low performing countries.

University of Georgia Research Foundation, Inc. (UGARF)
07/01/2012

Research has shown that engaging students, including students from underrepresented groups, in appropriately structured reasoning activities, including argumentation, may lead to enhanced learning. This project will provide information about how teachers learn to support collective argumentation and will allow for the development of professional development materials for prospective and practicing teachers that will enhance their support for productive collective argumentation.

San Diego State University (SDSU)
09/01/2019

This project will use an alternative model for online videos to develop video units that feature the unscripted dialogue of pairs of students. The project team will create a repository of 6 dialogic mathematics video units that target important Algebra 1 and 2 topics for high school and upper middle school students, though the approach can be applied to any STEM topic, for any age level.

RMC Research Corporation
09/01/2019

This project will study the Developing Leaders Transforming Practice (DLTP) intervention, which aims to improve teachers' instructional practices, increase student mathematics understanding and achievement.

Portland State University (PSU)
09/01/2019

This project will study the Developing Leaders Transforming Practice (DLTP) intervention, which aims to develop teacher leaders, improve teachers' instructional practices, and increase student mathematics understanding and achievement.

University of Michigan (UM), University of Denver (DU)
09/01/2011

This project designs materials and an accompanying support system to enable the development of expertise in the teaching of mathematics at the elementary level. The project has four main components: online professional development modules; practice-based assessments; resources for facilitators; and web-based technologies to deliver module content to diverse settings. Three modules are being developed and focus on fractions, reasoning and explanation, and geometry. Each module is organized into ten 1.5 hour sessions.

University of Missouri-Columbia
08/01/2017

This study can provide a basis for design research focused on developing effective materials and programs for flipped instruction in secondary mathematics, which is already occurring at an increasing rate, but it is not yet informed by empirical evidence. This project will result in a framework for flipped instruction robust enough to be useful at a variety of grade levels and contexts. The framework will provide a better understanding of the relationships among various implementations of flipped instruction and student learning.

University of Florida (UF)
08/15/2017

The project will provide the opportunity for upper elementary students to learn computer science and build strong collaboration practices. Leveraging the promise of virtual learning companions, the project will collect datasets of collaborative learning for computer science in diverse upper elementary school classrooms; design, develop, and iteratively refine its intelligent virtual learning companions; and generate research findings and evidence about how children collaborate in computer science learning and how best to support their collaboration with intelligent virtual learning companions.

North Carolina State University (NCSU)
08/15/2017

The project will provide the opportunity for upper elementary students to learn computer science and build strong collaboration practices. Leveraging the promise of virtual learning companions, the project will collect datasets of collaborative learning for computer science in diverse upper elementary school classrooms; design, develop, and iteratively refine its intelligent virtual learning companions; and generate research findings and evidence about how children collaborate in computer science learning and how best to support their collaboration with intelligent virtual learning companions.

Michigan State University (MSU)
09/01/2019

This project will support the participation of 53 US K-12 mathematics teachers, graduate students, community college/university mathematicians, mathematics teacher educators, and mathematics education researchers to attend the Fourteenth International Congress for Mathematical Education (ICME-14) in Shanghai, China.

Utah State University (USU)
07/01/2013

This project uses learning analytics and educational data mining methods to examine how elementary students learn in an online game designed to teach fractions using the splitting model. The project uses data to examine the following questions: 1) Is splitting an effective way to learn fractions?; 2) How do students learn by splitting?; 3) Are there common pathways students follow as they learn by splitting?; and 4) Are there optimal pathways for diverse learners?

University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)
10/01/2013

The overarching goal of this project is to develop innovative instructional resources and professional development to support middle grades teachers in meeting the challenges set by college- and career-ready standards for students' learning of algebra.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
06/15/2014

The overarching goal of this RAPID project is to contribute to the national goal of improving students' mathematical proficiency by providing information and guidance to mathematics education practitioners and scholars to support a sharpened focus on formative assessment. The project produces, analyzes, and makes available to the field timely information regarding the views and practices of mathematics teacher educators and professional development specialists regarding formative assessment early in the enactment of ambitious standards in mathematics.

University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine)
10/01/2016

The goal of this project is to improve the implementation of rigorous instructional materials in middle-grades mathematics at scale through a system of practical measures and routines for collecting and using data that both assesses and supports implementation.