Professor Megan Franke has been elected to the National Academy of Education. One of three University of California faculty members to join the academy this year, she will be inducted with 13 other new members from across the nation during the organization’s annual meeting in November.

“Megan Franke’s election to the National Academy of Education, one of the most august education societies in the world, fills the entire GSE&IS community with joy and pride,” says Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, Wasserman Dean of UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. “Megan is a scholar’s scholar, a marvelous mentor and an exemplary citizen of the university.”

“I am honored to join this impressive community of educational scholars and grateful to my many researcher, teacher, and student collaborators,” says professor Franke.

Franke’s research is focused on understanding and supporting learning for both pre-service and in-service teachers. She studies how teachers make use of research-based information about the development of children’s mathematical thinking (Cognitively Guided Instruction) and how CGI supports student learning in mathematics. Franke's research shows how  a teacher's attentiveness to students and their mathematical thinking can create better understanding and opportunities for low-income students of color.

In addition, Franke works with teacher educators from 11 teacher-education programs to design and study innovations that move the learning of teaching closer to practice and to create ongoing opportunities to transform teaching and learning in school.

Franke is currently involved in a large-scale professional development and research project that engages teachers in supporting mathematical learning, from preschool through second grade. She's also working on district-level studies of coherence in early childhood mathematics with the DREME (Development and Research in Early Mathematics Education) network team.

In addition she is working on a series of studies with Noreen Webb, UCLA professor of education, and Marsha Ing, associate professor of education at UC Riverside, that link classroom practice and student outcomes in elementary math classes.

Before joining the UCLA Department of Education in 1993, Franke was a third grade teacher, a doctoral student and then an associate researcher for the CGI project at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She served as director of UCLA’s Center X from 2001 to 2008, chair of the UCLA Department of Education 2008-2013 and as interim dean of GSE&IS in 2012.

In 2013, Professor Franke, along with her Diversity in Mathematics Education colleagues, was honored with the American Educational Research Association's Henry T. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education. In 2012, she was presented with AERA’s Relating Research to Practice Award. Franke is currently serving a three-year term as a member-at-Large on the AERA Council. She is also a member of the AERA Executive Board. 

Dean Suárez-Orozco highlights the fact that Franke’s election marks a 100 percent increase in UCLA’s faculty membership in the National Academy of Education in the last five years.

“That is a stunning record of achievement and tribute to the luminous brilliance of our colleagues in the education firmament,” he says.

This story is posted on Ampersand.