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Geoffrey B Saxe
Geoffrey B. Saxe (born June 12, 1948) is an American developmental psychologist. He is a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School in the School of Education at UC Berkeley. He is a former President of the Jean Piaget Society for the Study of Knowledge and Development, elected member of the National Academy of Education, elected fellow of the American Educational Research Association, and former Editor-in-Chief of the international journal, Human Development.
Saxe's research focuses on the interplay between cultural and cognitive developmental processes in the reproduction and alteration of ideas in human communities. Using mathematics as an illustrative domain, Saxe situates his work in the collective practices of daily life. He has also extended his developmental perspective to a program of design research in mathematics education.
Saxe grew up in Los Angeles, attending public schools along with his sister. His parents, the children of East European immigrants, became psychotherapists.
Saxe graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in psychology in 1970, and again, from the same institution and department, with a PhD in 1975 under the mentorship of Professor Jonas Langer. His training focused on cognitive development. Influenced by seminal developmental scholars including Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Heinz Werner, Saxe used numerical cognition to explore issues of cognitive development in children's thinking. Subsequent to graduate studies, Saxe spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Children's Hospital in Boston at Harvard Medical School under the sponsorship of Peter H. Wolff as well as Harvard's Project Zero and the Boston Veteran Administration hospital with Howard Gardner as his advisor. During this postdoctoral period, he extended his training in cognitive development to atypical development and the breakdown of cognitive functioning following brain injury, again with a focus on numerical cognition as an arena for analysis.
Saxe's faculty appointments began in 1977, first at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in the PhD Program in Educational Psychology. Later in 1982, he joined the faculty at UCLA, and still later, in 1997, joined the faculty at UC Berkeley as a professor in the Human Development Program of the Graduate School of Education.
Saxe's program of work has contributed to our understanding of the development numerical thought in different cultural communities. In a 1987 monograph, he and colleagues conducted a range of studies on the home environments and adult-child interactions in middle- and working- class communities. In home settings, they found that young children are inadvertently and sometimes purposely engaged with numerical activities by parents. They showed that not only do children adjust their activities involving number to home supports, often unwittingly, parents adjust their interactions with children in relations to their children's developing understandings. Hence children's early numerical environments constructed are dynamic and interactive, a process that supports children's acquisition of cultural forms for number representation, like counting systems, and increasingly use these forms to serve increasingly complex functions (e.g., counting to compare groups, elementary arithmetical transformations.)
In a related program of work, Saxe investigated the mathematical understandings of unschooled and schooled children who sell candy in the streets in NE Brazil during periods of a rapidly inflating economy. Through a coordination of ethnographic/observational research and quasi-experimental designs, his research revealed that largely unschooled sellers, as they plied their trade, create a distinct mathematics that is unlike school math, one rooted in different kinds of representations and ideas. Further, Saxe showed that sellers outstripped same-age schooled non-sellers in knowledge linked to their practice, like comparing ratios, and that when sellers did attend school, they made use of their out-of-school knowledge to support their understanding of school-linked math instruction.
Saxe's long-term field research project was conducted over more than a 30-year stretch of time with a remote Papua New Guinea group, the Oksapmin, who traditionally use a 27-body part counting system. The work formed the empirical basis for his book, Cultural Development of Mathematical Ideas. Through field visits (1978, 1980, 2001, 2014), he made use of archival, ethnographic, interview methods coupled with quasi-experimental designs in order to trace the interplay between historical change in the everyday numerical problems that emerged in collective practices and shifts in forms of the body system and functions that it served in daily life.
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Geoffrey B Saxe
Geoffrey B. Saxe (born June 12, 1948) is an American developmental psychologist. He is a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School in the School of Education at UC Berkeley. He is a former President of the Jean Piaget Society for the Study of Knowledge and Development, elected member of the National Academy of Education, elected fellow of the American Educational Research Association, and former Editor-in-Chief of the international journal, Human Development.
Saxe's research focuses on the interplay between cultural and cognitive developmental processes in the reproduction and alteration of ideas in human communities. Using mathematics as an illustrative domain, Saxe situates his work in the collective practices of daily life. He has also extended his developmental perspective to a program of design research in mathematics education.
Saxe grew up in Los Angeles, attending public schools along with his sister. His parents, the children of East European immigrants, became psychotherapists.
Saxe graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in psychology in 1970, and again, from the same institution and department, with a PhD in 1975 under the mentorship of Professor Jonas Langer. His training focused on cognitive development. Influenced by seminal developmental scholars including Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Heinz Werner, Saxe used numerical cognition to explore issues of cognitive development in children's thinking. Subsequent to graduate studies, Saxe spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Children's Hospital in Boston at Harvard Medical School under the sponsorship of Peter H. Wolff as well as Harvard's Project Zero and the Boston Veteran Administration hospital with Howard Gardner as his advisor. During this postdoctoral period, he extended his training in cognitive development to atypical development and the breakdown of cognitive functioning following brain injury, again with a focus on numerical cognition as an arena for analysis.
Saxe's faculty appointments began in 1977, first at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in the PhD Program in Educational Psychology. Later in 1982, he joined the faculty at UCLA, and still later, in 1997, joined the faculty at UC Berkeley as a professor in the Human Development Program of the Graduate School of Education.
Saxe's program of work has contributed to our understanding of the development numerical thought in different cultural communities. In a 1987 monograph, he and colleagues conducted a range of studies on the home environments and adult-child interactions in middle- and working- class communities. In home settings, they found that young children are inadvertently and sometimes purposely engaged with numerical activities by parents. They showed that not only do children adjust their activities involving number to home supports, often unwittingly, parents adjust their interactions with children in relations to their children's developing understandings. Hence children's early numerical environments constructed are dynamic and interactive, a process that supports children's acquisition of cultural forms for number representation, like counting systems, and increasingly use these forms to serve increasingly complex functions (e.g., counting to compare groups, elementary arithmetical transformations.)
In a related program of work, Saxe investigated the mathematical understandings of unschooled and schooled children who sell candy in the streets in NE Brazil during periods of a rapidly inflating economy. Through a coordination of ethnographic/observational research and quasi-experimental designs, his research revealed that largely unschooled sellers, as they plied their trade, create a distinct mathematics that is unlike school math, one rooted in different kinds of representations and ideas. Further, Saxe showed that sellers outstripped same-age schooled non-sellers in knowledge linked to their practice, like comparing ratios, and that when sellers did attend school, they made use of their out-of-school knowledge to support their understanding of school-linked math instruction.
Saxe's long-term field research project was conducted over more than a 30-year stretch of time with a remote Papua New Guinea group, the Oksapmin, who traditionally use a 27-body part counting system. The work formed the empirical basis for his book, Cultural Development of Mathematical Ideas. Through field visits (1978, 1980, 2001, 2014), he made use of archival, ethnographic, interview methods coupled with quasi-experimental designs in order to trace the interplay between historical change in the everyday numerical problems that emerged in collective practices and shifts in forms of the body system and functions that it served in daily life.