Elise Lockwood
Connect with Elise
Kidd 292A Fall 2025: MTH 4/591 Tuesdays 10am-11am (in person) and Wednesdays 11am-12pm (on Zoom); also available by appointment elise.lockwood@oregonstate.edu (541) 737-5164Elise Lockwood
Biography
Professor Lockwood received her Ph.D. in Mathematics Education from Portland State University in 2011. Before coming to Oregon State University, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, where she was mentored by Dr. Eric Knuth and Dr. Amy Ellis. In 2019, Lockwood was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Oslo in Oslo, Norway, and she maintains a professional connection with colleagues there. In 2025, she was a Fulbright Specialist at Maynooth Univeristy in Ireland. From 2021-2024, she served as a Program Officer in the Division of Undergraduate Education at the National Science Foundation. She is currently Co-Editor-in-Chief for the International Journal of Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education. In 2025 she was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).
Research
Lockwood's primary research interest involves undergraduate mathematics education, particularly studying how students think about and learn combinatorial topics. She has put forth a model of student's combinatorial thinking that especially emphasizes the role of sets of outcomes in effective counting. Other research in this area includes exploring student-generated connections among counting problems through a lens of actor-oriented transfer and determining the effectiveness of systematic listing in counting. Through two NSF-funded grants, she has recently investigated students’ generalizing activity as they solve advanced counting problems, and she is studying ways in which having students engage in computational activity can help them solve counting problems more successfully. Two additional collaborations and areas of research include studying the role of examples in proof and investigating the nature of mathematical equivalence in multiple mathematical areas.
Research Interests
- Mathematics Education
Education
Ph.D. in Mathematics Education, Portland State University
MST in Mathematics, Portland State University
Publications
- Recent publications:
- Lockwood, E. & Caughman, J. (2025). New Directions for Research on Domain-Specific Aspects of Proof: The Case of Combinatorics and Graph Theory. In M. Savic & K. Weber (Eds.) New directions in proving: Honoring the legacy of John and Annie Selden. Springer.
- Cook, J. P., Richardson, A., Payne, H., Wilson, C., Reed, Z., & Lockwood, E. (2025). Analyzing students' productive use of equivalence transformations. Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmathb.2025.101285
- Erickson, S. & Lockwood, E. (2024). Experienced provers’ use of contexts while engaging in combinatorial proof of binomial identities. International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology, 55(4), 946-975. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020739X.2022.2119175
- Cook, J. P., Richardson, A., Reed, Z., & Lockwood, E. (2023). Using conceptual analysis to resolve the tension between advanced and secondary mathematics: the cases of equivalence and inverse. ZDM – Mathematics Education, 55, 753-766.
Awards
- Recent awards:
- Fulbright Specialist. Awards travel to scholars to facilitate international collaboration. Travel granted to Maynooth, Ireland in for a project entitled Enhancing the task design skills of mathematics education researchers and lecturers. Summer 2025.
- Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) Award. Presidential award bestowed by the U.S. Government for outstanding scientists and engineers. Spring 2025.
- Promising Scholar Award. Annual University-wide award at Oregon State University that recognizes a junior faculty member based on outstanding scholarly merit. Fall 2019.
Presentations
- Recent presentations:
- Lockwood, E. “‘Counting is Hard’ but It’s Rewarding and Fun: Insights from a Research Program in Combinatorics Education.” University of Galway, Mathematics Department Colloquium. September 2025.
- Lockwood, E. “Task Design to Foster Rich Student Engagement in Mathematics Courses.” Two-day professional development workshop for the Fulbright Specialist Program. Maynooth University, Kildare Ireland. September 2025.
- Lockwood, E. “Integrating Computing into Mathematics Education: A Case of Python Programming in Combinatorial Contexts.” Annual Meeting of the Irish Mathematical Society. August 2025. Invited talk.
- Lockwood, E. “Exploring Connections between School and University Mathematics in Ireland: Conversations about Facilitating and Assessing Problem Solving.” Two-day professional development workshop for the Fulbright Specialist Program. Maynooth University, Kildare Ireland. August 2025.
- Lockwood, E. “Influential Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education: The International Journal of Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education.” Workshop on Building Capacity in the Scholarship of Mathematics Education: Supporting the Next Generation of Researchers. Fields Institute. Toronto, Canada. April 2025.
