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About Me: I was born in Haifa, Israel. My background is in cognitive psychology, which I studied at Tel Aviv University. Then I achieved a Ph.D. in Learning Sciences at Northwestern University and continued as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling. Once, I was a cellist.

Research Interests: I specialize in the study of mathematical intuition, reasoning, and learning from the synergistic perspectives of cognitive and socio-cultural theory. I investigate in particular the roles that mediated, reflexive interaction with a range of technologies plays in students' content-focused and intellectual development, which I view as trajectories from intuition to inscription. A core aspect of my professional practice is the design, production, implementation, and evaluation of innovative mixed-media concept-targeted curricular artifacts aligned with the emerging empiricism of individual cognition in social context. Operating in design-based research methodology, I am particularly interested in instances of spontaneous multimodal coordination of distributed epistemic and material resources and in the roles of teachers in facilitating conceptual insight. The work contributes toward developing rich models of cultural semiosis as well as principled methodology for actuating constructivist philosophy in the form of viable learning materials. I also explore the impact of Complexity Studies perspectives and methodologies on education research and have been arguing for the use of agent-based modeling to advance theory of individual learning in social context. During my tenure as a Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, I developed computer-based modules for learning probability. I have published in the Handbook of Mathematical Cognition, International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning (member of the editorial board), For the Learning of Mathematics, Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, and the Journal of Statistics Education, I am a member of the editorial board of The Journal of the Learning Sciences, and I contribute regularly to major international conferences.

Current Research Foci: As part of my NAEd/Spender Postdoctoral Fellowship project, Seeing Chance, I am studying the multimodality of student engagement with artifacts as they problem-solve probability related situations. I elicit tacit imagistic aspects of students' probabilistic reasoning and then incorporate those apparent images into the selected/new/modified artifacts I am designing, so as to augment their expressivity and, thus, facilitate student passage from intuition to inscription.

Recently, I have become increasingly interested in identifying and articulating the tacit, informal pedagogical practice of parents in families with academic traditions. As a mother interacts with her toddler who is problem-solving a mechanical toy, how might she best balance his challenge and frustration, so that the child develops a sense of self-efficacy and the epistemic disposition that he can "solve the world?" How might we leverage insight into these implicit mediation strategies so as to document efficacious heuristics and, moreover, embed them in widely disseminated artifacts that will contribute to a broader inclusion of underprivileged populaces into intellectual trajectories?