Wolff-Michael Roth

Wolff-Michael Roth (Born June 28, 1953, Heidelberg) is a learning scientist at the University of Victoria conducting research on how people across the life span know and learn mathematics and science. He has contributed to numerous fields of research: learning science in learning communities, coteaching, authentic school science education, cultural-historical activity theory, social studies of science, gesture studies, qualitative research methods, embodied cognition, situated cognition, and the role of language in learning science and mathematics.

Roth received a master's degree of physics from the University of Wuerzburg and completed a doctorate in the College of Science and Technology at the University of Southern Mississippi (Hattiesburg, Mississippi) with concentrations in cognition, statistics, and physical chemistry. He began to establish himself as a researcher while teaching at Appleby College (Oakville, Ontario). There, he did the research for what became one of the first research articles on the social construction of knowledge in science classrooms: "The social construction of scientific concepts or The concept map as conscription device and tool for social thinking in high school science." There he also conducted the work that would lead to Authentic School Science, in which he provides evidence for how high school students learn science when provided with opportunities to frame their own research questions, which they then answer by designing and conducting experiments. They write up their results, which they have to be able to defend within their learning community. In 1992, he joined Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, British Columbia), where he was mainly responsible for teaching statistics in the Faculty of Education. In his research, he initially focused on learning in science classrooms, but soon expanded his work to learning mathematics and science among future teachers, research scientists, and designers of computer software. In 1997, he was appointed Lansdowne Professor of Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Victoria. There he further expanded his research on the learning of mathematics and science, for example, on the use of graphs in scientific research and in technical professions.

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