About

Dr. Stacie K. Levine is a geriatrician and palliative medicine specialist at the University of Chicago, focusing on multimorbidity, serious illness care, pain management, and post-acute care transitions. She completed her medical training at Rush University Medical College, followed by an internal medicine residency and clinical fellowship in geriatrics at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. After a geriatrics research fellowship in Chicago, she joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2002. Dr. Levine is a fellow of both the American Geriatrics Society and the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. She currently serves as Chief of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine and participates in several national committees dedicated to curriculum development for post-graduate fellowship education. She is also a co-primary investigator of a multi-institutional project providing longitudinal training in serious illness care for interprofessional clinicians and staff across regional, national, and international audiences. At the University of Chicago, Dr. Levine has been recognized for her educational and clinical contributions, including appointments as a fellow in the Academy of Distinguished Medical Educators and as a senior faculty scholar in the Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence. She has received the Francis H. Straus Mentorship Award and is a graduate of the Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) program for women in medicine. Nationally, she has been honored with the Gerald H. Holman Distinguished Service Award and the Award for Excellence in Education and Training from the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. Dr. Levine has also been repeatedly recognized as a top doctor by Castle Connolly and Chicago Magazine.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Mathematics education
• Developmental psychology
• Computer Science
• Cognitive psychology
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• ManyNumbers 3: A Multi‐Lab Study of Demographic Correlates of Early Number Knowledge

  Developmental Science · 2026-04-20

  article

  Large scale studies have documented socioeconomic (SES) and racial/ethnic disparities in children's standardized math achievement at kindergarten entry. These early math skills predict future mathematics achievement and career success. However, limited research has been conducted using large sample sizes to understand how SES and race/ethnicity are related to children's numerical skills at even younger ages. The current study aims to investigate sociodemographic variability in three fundamental areas of early numeracy: nonverbal numerosity discrimination, rote counting, and cardinal number word knowledge. In addition, we will examine if the relations between numerical skills might be explained by their shared correlations to sociodemographic factors and if differences in numerical skills between sociodemographic groups can be explained by variability in working memory. Finally, we also investigate whether childcare attendance moderates early sociodemographic differences in numerical abilities. To achieve these goals, data from children aged 2; 6-6; 0 will be gathered from ∼ 45 US sites, drawn from a larger multi-lab international project (ManyNumbers project). The findings of this research will enhance our understanding of early emerging variability in numerical skills and provide insights into developing responsive and inclusive educational practices that support diverse learning needs in the early years. SUMMARY: Early mathematical skills are crucial for long-term academic and career achievement. SES and race/ethnicity-related disparities in math achievement emerge as early as preschool. Most studies use standardized math assessments that combine different numerical skills to assess achievement gaps, leaving uncertain which specific skills vary with demographic variables. We explore disparities in developmentally significant numerical skills and their relation to demographic variables. We also report relations between WM, childcare attendance and numerical skills. Data from approximately N = 1080 children aged 2;6-6;0 will be collected from ∼ 45 US labs, including demographic information and numeracy measures.

  PublisherDOI

• Systematic variation in proportion judgments: Spatial features impact adults’ strategies and decisions.

  Journal of Experimental Psychology General · 2026-01-26

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Proportional information is important for a range of everyday actions, from infants' and toddler's probabilistic inferences to adults' medical and financial decisions. Unfortunately, children and adults frequently make systematic errors in some proportional reasoning contexts. For example, people tend to focus more on the numerators, rather than the proportional relations, when proportions are discrete (i.e., with enumerable units) or when the subcomponents are spatially separated. Importantly, it is not that people cannot reason proportionally, as they do not make these same errors with continuous proportions presented as part of a single coherent whole. Although format-dependent variation has been shown across many studies with both children and adults, no work has systematically manipulated multiple aspects of visual, nonsymbolic proportional stimuli simultaneously to better understand which spatial factors impact proportional reasoning, and how. Here, we manipulate proportional stimuli in three ways: the availability of enumerable units (i.e., discreteness), predictability of the proportional information, and spatial separateness of the proportion subcomponents. We also formalize competing strategy explanations using mathematical models to infer people's strategies. Overall, we find that discreteness, predictability, and spatial separateness (as operationalized here) significantly impact adults' performance and strategies. Furthermore, all features interact with each other, and qualitative patterns suggest that spatial separateness and predictability may be particularly important, despite being less well-studied. By systematically varying the spatial features of proportions, we provide insight into the mechanisms that underlie proportional reasoning and highlight important interactions between spatial, numerical, and relational information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Adults' number gestures focus children on numeracy

  Cognition · 2026-02-26

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Iconic number gestures: Naturalistic use by children and parents in the early home environment.

  Developmental Psychology · 2025-08-28 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  A growing body of research suggests that children's use and understanding of cardinal number gestures (e.g., raising two fingers to indicate "two") reflect greater cardinal number knowledge than their number words alone (e.g., Butts, 2025; Gibson et al., 2019, 2022; Gunderson et al., 2015; Orrantia et al., 2024; Oswald et al., 2025). The present study adds to these findings by examining how often, and in what contexts, parents and their young children use iconic number gestures, with a particular focus on how these gestures are used in relation to number words. In a naturalistic, at-home longitudinal study, we found that 14- to 58-month-old children and their parents used iconic number gestures far less often than number words. Parents used more number words than the children, but children used more number gestures than the parents. Both children and parents used number gestures more often for nonpresent entities than for present entities, even though they both displayed the opposite pattern for number words (i.e., more number words for present than nonpresent entities). Finally, children were more likely to use number gestures if their parents used them (some parents never used number gestures during the observations), but neither parents' nor children's use of number gestures early on predicted children's cardinal number knowledge at 46 months of age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Children’s Interpretation of “Before” And “After” For Consecutive and Non-Consecutive Numbers and Events

  Journal of Cognition and Development · 2025-09-23

  articleSenior author

  When learning the integers, children must learn that number words are in a stable order and that this order is tied to magnitude. In previous work, U.S. English-speaking 5- and 6-year-old children’s interpretation of ordinal vocabulary (after, before) to compare numbers in the count list was restricted to consecutive numbers (e.g. 6 is after 5, but 7 is not), despite readily applying magnitude vocabulary (i.e. both 6 and 7 are bigger than 5). In the current study, we investigate whether this narrow interpretation of before/after is a more general feature of ordinal comparisons by comparing it to children’s interpretation of before/after in temporal event sequences (Experiment 1, <i>N</i> = 120) and to adults’ interpretation of before/after for both numerical and temporal sequences (Experiment 2, <i>N</i> = 120). First, we replicate the original finding: U.S. 5- and 6-year-old children are more likely to endorse using before/after for consecutive numbers than nonconsecutive numbers. Second, we do not find the same pattern in children’s judgments of event sequences, suggesting that it is caused by a feature of the count list that is not shared by event sequences. Third, we find that U.S. adults predominantly endorse before/after for both consecutive and nonconsecutive comparisons, though there is some variation consistent with children’s responding. These findings suggest that the narrow interpretation of before and after in U.S. children’s numerical judgments is not due to their interpretation of ordinality more generally, and instead may be tied to a specific feature of numerical sequences.

  PublisherDOI

• Adults’ Number Gestures Focus Children on Numeracy

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Less is not always more: Rich and meaningful counting books lead to greater gains in number understanding than sparse counting books.

  Developmental Psychology · 2024-09-30 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  = 71; child age = 3 years) were randomly assigned within their preintervention cardinal number understanding levels to one of three conditions: rich counting books (narrative and pictures involving a number goal), sparse counting books (text and pictures that provide opportunities to count and label the same cardinalities as in the rich condition but with no narrative), or nonnumerical control books that involve labeling colors of objects. Children's number knowledge was measured at pretest and at 2 and 4 weeks into the intervention. Findings showed that children randomized to rich counting book condition showed significantly greater cardinal number knowledge and counting skill by the final testing session compared to children in the sparse counting book condition and the color control book condition, which did not significantly differ from each other. Results have implications for the types of number talk that most effectively support children's number learning in the home environment and for the design of interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Children’s confidence on mathematical equivalence and fraction problems

  Journal of Experimental Child Psychology · 2024-07-22 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Examining the Interplay between the Cognitive and Emotional Aspects of Gender Differences in Spatial Processing

  Journal of Intelligence · 2024-03-04 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  Women reliably perform worse than men on measures of spatial ability, particularly those involving mental rotation. At the same time, females also report higher levels of spatial anxiety than males. What remains unclear, however, is whether and in what ways gender differences in these cognitive and affective aspects of spatial processing may be interrelated. Here, we tested for robust gender differences across six different datasets in spatial ability and spatial anxiety (N = 1257, 830 females). Further, we tested for bidirectional mediation effects. We identified indirect relations between gender and spatial skills through spatial anxiety, as well as between gender and spatial anxiety through spatial skills. In the gender → spatial anxiety → spatial ability direction, spatial anxiety explained an average of 22.4% of gender differences in spatial ability. In the gender → spatial ability → spatial anxiety direction, spatial ability explained an average of 25.9% of gender differences in spatial anxiety. Broadly, these results support a strong relation between cognitive and affective factors when explaining gender differences in the spatial domain. However, the nature of this relation may be more complex than has been assumed in previous literature. On a practical level, the results of this study caution the development of interventions to address gender differences in spatial processing which focus primarily on either spatial anxiety or spatial ability until such further research can be conducted. Our results also speak to the need for future longitudinal work to determine the precise mechanisms linking cognitive and affective factors in spatial processing.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Overturning Children’s Misconceptions about Ruler Measurement: The Power of Disconfirming Evidence

  Journal of Intelligence · 2024-06-22

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Children have persistent difficulty with foundational measurement concepts, which may be linked to the instruction they receive. Here, we focus on testing various ways to support their understanding that rulers comprise spatial interval units. We examined whether evidence-based learning tools—disconfirming evidence and/or structural alignment—enhance their understanding of ruler units. Disconfirming evidence, in this context, involves having children count the spatial interval units under an object that is not aligned with the origin of a ruler. Structural alignment, in this context, involves highlighting what a ruler unit is by overlaying plastic unit chips on top of ruler units when an object is aligned with the origin of a ruler. In three experiments employing a pre-test/training/post-test design, a total of 120 second graders were randomly assigned to one of six training conditions (two training conditions per experiment). The training conditions included different evidence-based learning principles or “business-as-usual” instruction (control), with equal allocation to each (N = 20 for each condition). In each experiment, children who did not perform above chance level on the pre-test were selected to continue with training, which resulted in a total of 88 students for the analysis of improvement. The children showed significant improvement in training conditions that included disconfirming evidence, but not in the structural alignment or control conditions. However, an exploratory analysis suggests that improvement occurred more rapidly and was retained better when structural alignment was combined with disconfirming evidence compared to disconfirming evidence alone.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01NS026871

  NIH · $261k · 1995

• SL - CN: A Research-Practice Collaboration to Improve Math Learning in Young Children

  NSF · $750k · 2015–2020

• Enviromental & Biological Variation and Language Growth

  NIH · $34.1M · 2002–2020

Frequent coauthors

• Janellen Huttenlocher

  57 shared

• Sian L. Beilock

  Columbia University

  48 shared

• Elizabeth A. Gunderson

  Indiana University Bloomington

  41 shared

• Kelly S. Mix

  University of Maryland, College Park

  37 shared

• Susan Goldin‐Meadow

  37 shared

• Judy Reilly

  San Diego State University

  25 shared

• Laurent Mesnard

  Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris

  25 shared

• Joan Stiles

  University of California, San Diego

  25 shared

Education

• M.D.

  The University of Chicago