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In Memoriam: Elizabeth Fennema

  • In Memoriam

    Elizabeth Fennema

    Elizabeth Fennema

    It is with sadness that we announce the passing of Elizabeth Fennema, who  will be remembered for her setting revolutionary work that helped establish a path in mathematics education for women. Elizabeth Fennema was the most recent recipient of the NCTM Lifetime Achievement Award and she served on the NCTM Research Advisory Committee in the 1970s.  

    Fennema earned a B.S. degree in psychology from Kansas State University in 1950, her M.A. degree in education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1952, and a Ph.D., also from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in education with an emphasis in mathematics education. She was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1962 to 1996.

    Some of Fennema’s most notable work was on gender in mathematics. After publishing a review of gender differences literature in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education in 1974, she teamed with Julia Sherman to produce what is now known as the Fennema-Sherman studies. With methodological rigor and new measurement tools (the Fennema-Sherman Scales), the pair redefined knowledge and perspectives on the intersection of gender and achievement in mathematics, showing that underperformance by females was sociocultural in nature and a function of opportunity, and not owing to scientific differences.

    In the 1980s, Elizabeth Fennema joined Thomas Carpenter and others for another groundbreaking body of work that came to be known as cognitively guided instruction (CGI). The research program was a model for applying new theories of constructivism to children's mathematics learning. Fennema's work in CGI supported professional development efforts to empower teachers to use their findings to improve elementary mathematics education. This combination of understanding student cognition and developing teacher learning in the same research program was ambitious and relatively novel for the time. Few, if any, mathematics research programs have been as comprehensive, rigorous, and influential in the field of mathematics education as CGI.

    As a researcher, author, and educator, Elizabeth Fennema received many honors, notably a Presidential Citation from the American Educational Research Association (AERA; 1997).  She gave the inaugural awardee presentation for Outstanding Contribution to Research on Women and Education, and she was named a member of the National Academy of Education (NAE) in 1997.

    She will be greatly missed by the NCTM and mathematics education communities.