Dr. Roth received her PhD in Science Education from Michigan State University (MSU), a master’s degree in secondary science teaching from Johns Hopkins University, and an undergraduate degree in Biology from Duke University. Her career in education includes seven years as a middle and high school science teacher followed by fifteen years as a teacher educator and researcher at Michigan State University, and 10 years as a researcher at and then director of LessonLab Research Institute (Santa Monica, CA). She has been at BSCS since 2009.
Much of Dr. Roth’s research while at MSU occurred in her role as a teacher-researcher, where she taught elementary school science and studied her own practice and her students’ learning. While Director of the LessonLab Research Institute, her research examined science teaching in other teachers’ classrooms, starting with the international TIMSS Video Study of Eighth-Grade Science Teaching and followed by three additional studies: the Science Teachers Learning from Lesson Analysis project (STeLLA), the Videocases for Science Teaching Analysis project (ViSTA), and the Tying Words to Images of Science Teaching project (TWIST). The use of videocases is central in each of these projects, sometimes as a strategy to support preservice or inservice teacher learning and sometimes as a research tool.