Profile: Angela McIver

For Angela McIver, pursuing a PhD at GSE grew out of sheer necessity. While directing an after-school program for low-income high school students in Philadelphia, she found that she was unable to positively impact her students' math achievement. "My after-school program was charged with preparing students for math related majors in college," says Angela. "But what I found was that my students were going to college in high numbers but dropping out of their math and science majors like flies." When she attempted to find assessments and curricula that would prepare her students for high-level math, she found little to support her efforts. "The utter lack of useful tools for working with older students with weak math foundations is what led me to GSE and the Ph.D. program in Teaching, Learning, and Curriculum," she says.

From the beginning, Angela knew she wanted to study older students who struggled with basic math. "I was determined to figure out why so many students fail to understand the math they should have learned in elementary school." Under the guidance of Janine Remillard, the chair of her dissertation committee, Angela designed a dissertation using task-based math interviews of forty middle school students. She received a Spencer dissertation fellowship for her study Number Sense: A study of urban middle school students' numerical reasoning. "What I learned from my dissertation fundamentally changed the way I think about teaching math," she says. "After years of poor or inconsistent teaching, students become confused about math in very predictable ways. If we can identify the ways they are confused, we can customize the intervention."

After completing her dissertation, Angela decided to forego the academic job search and start her own company. In 2005 she founded Math Foundations, LLC, an education company that focuses on helping schools and organizations teach students with weak math foundations. Angela believes her company's most important work is creating innovative educational tools for teachers working with struggling math students. In the spring of 2008, her company piloted its first product, The Assessment of Foundational Math Understanding with Aspire Charter Schools of California — the largest charter management organization in the country.  Her company is currently working with software developers to bring this assessment tool to market. "From the beginning, I wanted to develop an assessment tool that was similar to those used for reading," she says.  "There is so much research on reading that teachers are given a very clear roadmap on how to support students. I want to provide a similar roadmap for teachers of math."

With the completion of her assessment tool, Angela has started work on an intervention program that helps address the unique needs of older students with weak math foundations. She says that the decision to start her own business "was motivated by a desire to develop the kinds of tools and resources I wish I had had at my disposal when I was a teacher and a director of an after-school program." Since its inception, Math Foundations has worked closely with the U.S. Department of Labor to bring rigor and relevance to math instruction in the nations' Job Corps programs. Her company also works with a number of K-12 schools and districts, as well as two and four-year colleges, to support students who struggle with basic math.

Angela lives in University City with her husband Bill Jenkins EAS '85 and their three children. In her spare time she volunteers at Penn Alexander School (Penn's partnership school) as co-coach of the Continental Math League team and also volunteers at the Philadelphia Job Corps Center tutoring students who have dropped out of school.