About

Kara Jackson is a professor and chair of Teaching, Learning and Curriculum at the University of Washington College of Education. She is a mathematics education researcher and teacher educator whose work focuses on understanding and contributing to the conditions in which youth and teachers flourish in mathematics classrooms. Her research studies the work of secondary teaching that enables students to participate substantially in mathematics that is intellectually expansive, generative, and personally meaningful. She also studies and contributes to the design of how schools and districts can be organized to support teachers’ development of rich and powerful mathematics teaching. Jackson's research is grounded in long-term partnerships with educators, including teachers, coaches, and system leaders, as well as other researchers. Her work has been supported by notable organizations such as the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Prior to her current role, she was an assistant professor of mathematics education at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, and a post-doctoral research fellow at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her career began with teaching secondary mathematics in Vanuatu as a Peace Corps volunteer and supporting youth and families as a mathematics specialist for the Say Yes to Education Foundation in Philadelphia. Her contributions include developing practical tools and routines to support educators in investigating and revising instructional strategies in mathematics, as well as identifying critical components of district and school systems that influence the development of rich mathematics teaching. Jackson has authored books and numerous journal articles and chapters, advancing the field of mathematics education through her research on instructional improvement, classroom practices, and teacher development.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Data Mining
• Sociology
• Mathematics education
• Pedagogy
• Social psychology
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Supporting, Investigating, and Theorizing Teacher Candidates and Mentor Teachers Co-Learning Equity-Oriented Mathematics Teaching (Poster 5)

  2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Mathematics teachers’ interpretations of students’ perceptions of the classroom learning environment: opportunities for inquiry

  Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education · 2025-07-27

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Religion and spirituality in pediatric end-of-life: a systematic review

  Journal of Pediatric Psychology · 2025-10-08

  article1st authorCorresponding

  OBJECTIVES: Spirituality is a recognized element of palliative care, with documented benefits for adult patients. However, limited research exists on how religion and spirituality affect children at end-of-life (EOL) and their parents. This review aimed to evaluate the quality of existing studies, describe the spiritual and religious beliefs and practices of pediatric patients and their parents, examine how these factors influence care, coping, and decision-making, and assess the importance of spiritual support during EOL. METHODS: A systematic review was conducted according to PRISMA guidelines. This review included 21 reports with 18 from database searches (MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycINFO) and 3 from hand-searched references published between 2013 and 2024. The date last searched was December 31, 2024. Study quality was assessed using the Standard Quality Assessment Criteria (QualSyst). RESULTS: Findings revealed diverse religious and spiritual practices among families, including faith stability, spiritual care use, and prayer. Key outcomes associated with spirituality included enhanced coping, acceptance, meaning-making, hope, caregiver spiritual well-being, decision-making, and improved parent-child communication. Across studies, spiritual support emerged as a vital component of the pediatric EOL experience. CONCLUSIONS: The review highlights the significant role of religion and spirituality for parents navigating their child's EOL, with implications for emotional and psychological support. These findings underscore the importance for healthcare providers to recognize and integrate spiritual care into pediatric palliative settings. However, the lack of direct pediatric patient input indicates a need for further research to understand how children experience and are influenced by their own religious and spiritual beliefs at EOL.

  PublisherDOI

• Resources for and from Collaboration: A Conceptual Framework

  New ICMI studies series · 2024-01-01 · 3 citations

  book-chapterOpen accessSenior author

  Resources are important for all joint work and learning, and particularly for collaborative professional work and learning among teachers. They provide a means for the design of learning environments, for joint work in pursuit of learning goals, and can support links between teacher collaborative learning and teaching practice. They can also be a focus of analysis for research and explanatory mechanisms that illuminate the complexity of relationships in collaborative work.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• When Theory Should Guide Action, What Kind of Theorizing Do We Need?

  Springer international handbooks of education · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Expansive Ways of Knowing and Improving: Using Equity Tools and Approaches to Support Equity of Participation in Learning Activities

  Proceedings. · 2024-06-10

  articleOpen access

  This symposium brings together projects that are developing and testing equity analytics in education.Equity analytics are a genre of learning analytics that attends to the distribution of and participation in opportunities to learn, with attention to inequities linked to students' social identities and wider systems of marginalization and oppression that impact classrooms and schools.Each of the projects has engaged not only in developing tools for gathering data related to inequities of participation but also for helping educators take action to reduce inequities in their classrooms and schools.Findings generated from each project illustrate how, through working in close partnership with educators, equity analytics systems can be developed that are feasible to use and that can inform practice.These projects also underscore the challenges of implementing equity analytics within inequitable systems that emphasize goals of accountability and with educators with varied conceptions of what constitutes equitable participation and learning. Symposium overviewReinholz and Shah (2018) first introduced equity analytics as a quantitative approach to analyzing aspects of equity and inequity in classrooms.Their initial work demonstrated the potential of a practical tool for documenting and visualizing inequities in classrooms, which they defined as misalignments in distribution of participation and opportunities for participation in classroom learning activities (Shah & Lewis, 2019).Since then, researchers have expanded scholarship in equity analytics, exploring the participatory design of equity analytics systems (Campos et al.,

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Opportunities for Colearning Equity-Oriented Mathematics Instruction in the Field Experience

  2024-01-30

  book-chapter

  This chapter offers provisional routines and a tool aimed at supporting teacher candidates and mentor teachers to learn together in becoming equity-oriented mathematics educators. These routines and tool aim to bring to life AMTE’s Standards for Preparing Teachers of Mathematics (2017) vision that field experiences should be mutually beneficial, “a system of simultaneous growth and renewal for the teacher candidate-mentor teacher-university supervisor team” such that “all participants learn and lead while they work on behalf of students” (p. 37). We offer an example of how interactions in the field experience, guided by the routines and tool we are creating, can serve as an authentic, mutually beneficial partnership between teacher education programs and K-12 schools enabling teachers at different points in their careers to work together to develop and deepen their vision, understandings, and practices of equity-oriented mathematics instruction. The routines and the tool intend to support simultaneous learning and growth for both teacher candidates and their mentor teachers in ways that are flexible enough to be implemented in a variety of university and field placement settings. Our exploration focuses on the following questions in the context of a design research study:

  PublisherDOI

• Using a Practical Measure to Support Inquiry Into Professional Development Facilitation

  Mathematics Teacher Educator · 2023-09-01 · 4 citations

  article

  Despite the complexity of facilitating professional development (PD) and growing attention to supporting facilitators, few tools exist for facilitators to engage in ongoing inquiry into their practice. In this article, we offer a practical measure, the Collaborative Professional Development Survey (CPDS), designed to provide facilitators with information about teachers’ perceptions of aspects of the PD learning environment that research indicates matter for teachers’ opportunities to learn. We illustrate how facilitators used the CPDS to support their collective inquiry into facilitation. We also illustrate the social processes that appeared to enable facilitators’ productive use of the CPDS, including a routine to analyze the resulting data, and the orientations that underpinned their analysis. We discuss implications for facilitators’ use of the CPDS.

  PublisherDOI

• Leveraging cultural forms in human‐centred learning analytics design

  British Journal of Educational Technology · 2023-09-10 · 11 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract In this article, we offer theory‐grounded narratives of a 4‐year participatory design process of a Learning Analytics tool with K‐12 educators. We describe how we design‐in‐partnership by leveraging educators' routines, values and cultural representations into the designs of digital dashboards. We make our long‐term reasoning visible by reflecting upon how design decisions were made, discussing key tensions and analysing to what extent the developed tools were taken up in practice. Through thick design narratives, we reflect upon how cultural forms—recognizable cultural constructs that might cue and facilitate specific activities—were identified among educators and informed the design of a dashboard. We then examined the extent to which the designed tool supported coaches and teachers to engage in Generative Uncertainty, an interpretive stance in which educators manifest productive inquiries towards data. Our analysis highlights that attuning to cultural forms is a valuable first step but not enough towards designing LA tools for systems in ways that fit institutionalized practices, challenge instrumental uses and spur productive inquiry. We conclude by offering two key criteria for making culturally‐grounded design decisions in the context of long‐term partnerships. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic Participatory design can invite stakeholders to directly inform the creation of LA artefacts that fit their needs, context and cultural markers. What this paper adds Cultural forms can be identified and leveraged in the design of LA tools. HCLA scholars ought to design for systems —the complex body of organizational routines, cultural practices and interactions among multiple stakeholders—and not just for users . Implications for practice and/or policy Leveraging cultural forms in LA needs to be accompanied by a critical view of which practices, behaviours, values and structures are suggested by such forms. Designing features that are easy to use, are associated with concrete tasks, and fit into existing cultural practices are three criteria for embedding cultural forms into LA design.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An Empirically Grounded System of Supports for Improving the Quality of Mathematics Teaching on a Large Scale

  Implementation and Replication Studies in Mathematics Education · 2021 · 21 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Mathematics education

  Abstract Research on the teaching and learning of mathematics has made significant progress in recent years. However, this work has had only limited impact on classroom instruction in many countries. We report on an eight-year project in which we partnered with several large urban school districts in the US that were attempting to support mathematics teachers’ development of ambitious, inquiry-oriented instructional practices. These partnerships provided contexts in which we could iteratively test and revise conjectures about instructional improvement strategies intended to support teachers’ and others’ learning. The product of this work is a theory of action for instructional improvement at scale that spans from the classroom to school system instructional leadership. We present project findings as they relate to key elements of the theory including: teachers’ knowledge, perspective and practices; instructional materials and student assessments; participatory supports for teachers’ learning; and additional supports for currently struggling students.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Improving the Implementation of Rigorous Instructional Materials in Middle-Grades Mathematics: Developing a System of Practical Measures and Routines

  NSF · $2.1M · 2016–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Paul Cobb

  Vanderbilt University

  20 shared

• Kenneth A. Frank

  Michigan State University

  10 shared

• Erin Henrick

  Vanderbilt University

  8 shared

• Thomas M. Smith

  NOAA Center for Satellite Applications and Research

  5 shared

• Hannah Nieman

  University of Washington

  4 shared

• June Ahn

  University of California, Irvine

  4 shared

• Jonee Wilson

  University of Virginia

  4 shared

• Charlotte Dunlap

  University of Toronto

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowshi…