Amy Smith
Assistant Professor of Education
I begin from the assumption that my students are the experts of their own knowledge and I can only know what my students know when I ask them. With this in mind, my teaching, research, and learning is inherently bound in listening to others and asking them (my favorite question) why? Learning is a process that has no set map nor timeline. We learn when it makes sense to us, and teachers cannot force this process--we can only foster an environment that supports all members of the classroom community.
- PhD, education and human development, University of Colorado Denver
- MS, educational psychology, University of Colorado Denver
- BA, interdisciplinary studies liberal arts for elementary education with an emphasis in mathematics education, University of Northern Colorado
Biography
Amy Smith, PhD, is an assistant professor of education specializing in elementary mathematics education. The primary goal of her research is to explore children's temporal and durational reasoning, specifically, how children make meaning of time as a quality and quantity of their daily lives. Smith began her educational career as an elementary teacher.
Through her 13 years in public schools, she taught 2nd-5th grade, getting her MA in educational psychology and beginning her graduate work. Smith has been working with future teachers throughout her career and is truly passionate about learning with and from her students.
More About Amy Smith
Research
- Elementary Education
- Mathematics Education
- Thinking and Learning
- Constructivism
- Funds of Knowledge
Course Sampling
- Mathematics in the Elementary School
- Elementary Mathematics
- Smith, A. (2021, October). Young Children's Use of Gesturing During Durational Reasoning. Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, Philadelphia, PA.
- Smith, A. (2021, April). Time to teach time: Teaching durational reasoning before clock reading. Annual Meeting of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Denver, St. Louis, MO.
- Smith, A. (2020). Children's durational organization of everyday experiences: A mathematical perspective of a linguistic study. Annual Meeting of Psychology of Mathematics Education, North America. Mazatlán, Mexico.
- Smith, A. (2019). Early chunky and smooth images of change in the durational reasoning of two second graders. Annual Meeting of Psychology of Mathematics Education, North America. St Louis, MO.
- Jorgensen, C., Smith, A., Tzur, R., & Johnson, H. L. (2019). Unit distinction as a pre-requisite for multiplicative reasoning: A case study of Adam's unit transformation. Annual Meeting of Psychology of Mathematics Education, North America. St Louis, MO.
- Smith, A. (2019, July). What are we measuring? Teaching durational reasoning before clock reading. Annual Meeting of the Colorado Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Denver, CO.
- Gardner, A., Smith, A., & Johnson, H. L. (2019, February) Humanizing the coding of college algebra students' attitudes towards math. Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education, Oklahoma City, OK: RUME.
Tzur, R., Wei, B., Smith, A., Norton, N., Davis, A., & Johnson, H. L. (2018). Same unit coordination: A conceptual screener for mixed unit coordination and base-10, place value reasoning. In E. Bergqvist, M. Ã-sterholm, C. Granberg, & L. Sumpter (Eds.). Proceedings of the 42nd Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (Vol. 4, pp. 323-330). UmeÃ¥, Sweden: PME. - Johnson, H. L., Olson, G., Gardner, A., & Smith, A. (2018, August 3). From soliciting answers to eliciting reasoning: Questioning our questions in digital math tasks. Colorado Math Teacher, CCTM.