Education Researcher, SRI Education
Marta Mielicki is a cognitive psychologist and an education researcher with expertise in mathematics and metacognition. She has developed, executed and managed research projects using quantitative and qualitative approaches and a variety of methodologies. Mielicki brings over a decade of experience researching how educators and caregivers can combat learners’ mathematical misconceptions and negative math attitudes, how math content can be structured and presented to optimize learning outcomes for diverse learners and how educators and families can support students’ self-guided learning.
Mielicki contributes to multiple projects at SRI. She is involved in several projects within the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Appalachia, which supports partnerships with school districts and state departments of education to use data and research to improve academic outcomes for students in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. She also supports the evaluation of the Barr Foundation’s Engage New England Initiative, which funds grantees to design and implement innovative high schools for students who are off track for graduation. She has assisted with analysis of teacher outcomes for an implementation study of a program designed to support multilingual learners’ development of academic literacy skills, funded by an Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Expansion grant from the U.S. Department of Education. She is also on the research team evaluating the Primary Promise program, which provides targeted, small-group instruction with the goal of improving literacy and math learning outcomes in several elementary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).
Mielicki has published in several top journals, including Learning and Instruction and Perspectives on Psychological Science. She regularly presents her work at conferences held by the American Educational Research Association, the Mathematical Cognition and Learning Society and others. She also frequently serves as a reviewer for journals such as the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition; Metacognition and Learning and the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
Before joining SRI, Mielicki was a postdoctoral teaching professor at Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science, where she taught undergraduates and led research projects examining cognitive abilities underlying math achievement. Before that, she was a postdoctoral research associate at Kent State University, where she led research projects related to proportional reasoning and visual mathematical representations. Mielicki also taught high-school math in the Boston Public School System and English as a foreign language in Prague, Czechia.
Mielicki earned her PhD in cognitive psychology with a minor in math education and learning sciences from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her BS in secondary math education from Boston University.
Key projects
Highlighted publications
- *Task features change the relation between math anxiety and number line estimation performance with rational numbers: Two large-scale online studies.
- *Number lines can be more effective at facilitating adults’ performance on health-related ratio problems than risk ladders and icon arrays.
- *Leveraging mathematical cognition to combat health innumeracy.
- *Perceptions of ease and difficulty, but not growth mindset, relate to specific math attitudes.
- *Exploring the necessary conditions for observing interleaved practice benefits in problem solving.
- *Effects of figural and numerical presentation formats on growing pattern performance.
View a complete list of Mielicki’s publications on Google Scholar