Dr. Jason Cooper

Research

My research takes place at the intersection of the various communities involved in mathematics education, including teachers, mathematicians and education researchers, and is concerned with ways in which these communities can learn from and with each other, through processes of boundary crossing. I am currently investigating this topic in three contexts:

The RBMC project (Raising the Bar in Mathematics Classrooms, in collaboration with Boris Koichu), which brings together researchers, teachers and teacher educators with the shared goal of promoting challenging problem-solving activity in middle-school mathematics classrooms in ways that are equitable and inclusive of all students.
The M-Cubed and M-Cubed Bridges projects (in collaboration with Alon Pinto), which brings together mathematicians, mathematics teachers and education researchers to co-learn about teaching and learning mathematics in high school and at university.
Informal teacher-learning (in collaboration with Nadav Ehrenfeld), that takes place in informal meetings and discussions in the field (e.g., among teachers and MoE supervisors).

Research page

Selected Publications

Transition-to-proof reconceived: Mathematicians explore teaching through teachers eyes (submitted)

Pinto A. & Cooper J. (2026)

Exploring Convergences and Divergences in Pedagogical Judgment During Teacher Workplace Conversations

Ehrenfeld N., Araidy R., Elgamal R., Cooper J. & Sabbah S. (2025) Proceedings of the 19th International Conference of the Learning Sciences - ICLS 2025 . Jornet A., Rajala A., Cortez A., Lotz-Sisitka H., Markauskaite L. & Hofmann R.(eds.). p. 1319-1323

While teacher learning is typically studied in the context of formal professional development (PD) activities, many teacher learning opportunities emerge from teachers daily workplace conversations. However, these conversations are spread across time and space, difficult to analyze, and are less prominent in the field as the locus of research. In this paper, we explore challenges and opportunities for teachers to hone their pedagogical judgment, amidst convergences and divergences in their perspectives, while teachers are attending to their daily work. To do so, we integrate two frameworks for the study of teachers as agentic sensemakers. We illustrate the integrated perspective through cases of two secondary mathematics teachers team meetings from two schools in Israel. The analysis highlights that even when conflicts between pedagogical perspectives are explicit, some aspects of their convergences and divergences are implicit, which poses a challenge for teachers productive pedagogical discourse and for researchers analysis of workplace conversations.

Post-funding implementation - Attending to teachers' readiness

Cooper J. & Koichu B. (2025) Proceedings of the Fourteenth Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (CERME14) . Bozen-Bolzano, Italy: . Vol. TWG23: Implementation of Research Findings in Mathematics Education.

Our goal is this article is to contemplate what might happen with mathematics education innovations at a post-implementation stage, when funding for professional accreditation of the participating teachers terminates. To this end, we attended to our experience with running a voluntary mathematics club for teachers that features mathematical problem solving, and analysed one of the meetings of the club in some detail. We found that of four processes under the umbrella of implementation as defined by Koichu et al. (2021), traces of three processes-constructing agency, changing communication, adapting the innovation-can be identified in the club discussions. Furthermore, we provide evidence in support of a hypothesis that these processes can be related to the development of the teachers' readiness to implement the innovation. We conclude by a call to further explore anchoring and sustainability of R&D projects having limited funding periods.

Teachers' Pedagogical Sensemaking of Mathematics Education Research through Replication: a Way of Increasing Implementability of Research Findings

Cooper J., Hershkowitz R. & Koichu B. (2024) Implementation and Replication Studies in Mathematics Education. 4, 2, p. 243-281

Arguably, all educational research is conducted with the goal of improving teaching and learning. However, research may not explicitly suggest implications for practice. Furthermore, teachers may not be convinced by findings based on academic theories and methods of analysis that are foreign to them. This suggests that findings of such research may have a low level of implementability. We posit that replication of research by teachers can lead them to findings that are more implementable for them. In this article we elaborate the notion of implementability of educational research findings, make a theoretical case for teachers' qualitative replication of basic research, and offer the notion of pedagogical sensemaking as the activity by which research findings may become implementable for teachers. We investigate this practice based on empirical data gathered in a graduate course for practicing teachers, who were required to replicate a well-known piece of basic research in mathematics education.

All Publications