Susan Baker Empson

Susan Baker Empson is an American scholar of mathematics education whose work includes longitudinal studies of children's mathematical development, the use of Cognitively Guided Instruction in mathematics education, analyses of childhood understanding of the concept of fractions, and research on the professional development of mathematics educators. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Learning, Teaching, and Curriculum at the University of Missouri, where she held the Richard Miller endowed chair of mathematics education.

Education and career Empson majored in art at Queens College, Charlotte in North Carolina, with a minor in mathematics; she graduated summa cum laude in 1983. After two years teaching mathematics in Morocco through the Peace Corps, she became a mathematics teacher at A. Philip Randolph Campus High School in New York City in 1987. While in New York, she also went to Teachers College, Columbia University for a master's degree in mathematics education and a minor in educational technology, completed in 1988.

In 1990, she moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison for continuing graduate study in mathematics education. She completed her Ph.D. there in 1994, with a minor in cognitive science in education. Her dissertation, The Development of Children's Fraction Thinking in a First-grade Classroom, was supervised by Thomas P. Carpenter. She also worked at the university as a lecturer from 1993 to 1995, and stayed on as a post-doctoral researcher from 1994 to 1996.

In 1996, she took a faculty position at the University of Texas at Austin, as an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. She remained there until 2016, progressing through the faculty ranks, until retiring in 2016 as professor emerita. In that year she moved to the University of Missouri, as a professor in the Department of Learning, Teaching, and Curriculum, Richard Miller endowed chair of mathematics education, and associate director of the Institute for Reimagining and Researching STEM Education. She has since retired again, as professor emerita.

Selected publications Books 2nd ed., 2015

Articles