Senior Researcher

Traci Higgins

Program/Areas of Interest

  • Data Literacy
  • STEM Education Research
  • Critical Reasoning
  • Interdisciplinary Thinking
  • Inquiry Driven Learning
  • Professional Development
  • Curriculum Development

Biography

Dr. Traci Higgins is a senior researcher in STEM education at TERC. She has over 20 years’ experience conducting research and developing educational materials, processes, and models to support STEM learning and teaching both in school and out-of-school, focusing on K-8 mathematics, data science K-12+, the social sciences, and interdisciplinary thinking. Her work includes co-developing out-of-school curricula to introduce adolescents to data science using multivariate real-word data and studying how youth use technology to visualize and explore data. She directs the Civic Data Project which collaboratively works with social studies teachers to develop activities to support exploration of civic data driven by students’ own questions. She also co-directs a project that examines how teams of undergraduate students leverage formal and informal skills, knowledge, and perspectives to navigate being awash in large, complex, real-world data during DataFest, an open-ended, weekend-long data competition.

Dr. Higgins’ background training is in developmental and cognitive psychology, with postdoctoral work in cognitive studies for educational practice. Her teaching experience includes undergraduate courses on the psychology of learning, fundamental college mathematics, and statistics for the behavioral sciences; a graduate course on psychological assessment; a mathematics playgroup for preschoolers; summer school for middle and high school students struggling in mathematics; an enrichment course introducing middle schoolers to data science and epidemiology; and supervising capstone research projects for college seniors in the social sciences. Her relationship building with students and families includes over ten years of coaching soccer and basketball. She is an outdoor enthusiast who gardens, hikes, hunts wild mushrooms, raises heritage chickens, and cooks with wild edibles.

Education

  • Ph.D. (Cognitive Psychology) Clark University, Worcester, MA, 1998
  • M.A. (Psychology) Clark University, Worcester, MA, 1994
  • B.A. (Psychology) Bates College, 1991

Highlighted Publications

Higgins, T., Mokros, J., Rubin, A., Sagrans, J. (2023). Students’ approaches to exploring the relationship between categorical variables. Teaching Statistics, 45(S1), S52-S66. URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/test.12331

Higgins, T., Russell, S., & Schifter, D. (2022). Student-generated conjecture about the behavior of the operations: Four dimensions supporting a structural understanding of arithmetic. Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics , 32(3): 183-200.

Sussman, A., Hammerman, J.K.L., Higgins, T, and Hochberg, E.D. (2019). Questions to elicit students’ mathematical ideas. Teaching Children Mathematics, 25(5), 306-312.

Russell, S.J.; Schifter, D.; Kasman, R.; Bastable, V.; Higgins, T. (2017) But Why Does It Work? Mathematical Argument in the Elementary Classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Konold, C., Higgins, T., Russell, S.J., & Khalil, K. (2015). Data Seen Through Different Lenses. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 88(3): 305-325. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10649-013-9529-8

Konold, C. & Higgins, T. L. (2003). Reasoning about data. In J. Kilpatrick, W.G. Martin, & D. Schifter (Eds.), A Research Companion to Prinicipals and Standards for School Mathematics (pp. 193-215). Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.