Nicole McNeil

Contact Information

Nicole M. McNeil
Department of Psychology
118 Haggar Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556
Office: 574-631-5678 FAX: 574-631-8883
Email: nmcneil@nd.edu
Web: www.nd.edu/~nmcneil

Degrees

Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison
B.S. Carnegie Mellon University

Honors/Awards

2004-2005 American Psychological Association (APA) Dissertation Award
2003-2004 American Psychological Foundation E. M. Koppitz Graduate Travel Stipend

Educational research interests

Development of mathematical cognition

Current educational studies

Arithmetic practice that promotes conceptual understanding and computational fluency

Optimizing concrete materials to support children’s understanding of mathematical concepts

Understanding the influence of formal mathematics instruction on children’s informal numerical reasoning

Select Publications

McNeil, N. M. (2008). Limitations to teaching children 2 + 2 = 4:
Typical arithmetic problems can hinder learning of mathematical equivalence. Child Development, 79, 1524-1537.

McNeil, N. M. & Jarvin, L. (2007). When theories don’’t add up: Disentangling the manipulatives debate. Theory Into Practice, 46, 309-316.

McNeil, N. M. (2007). U-shaped development in math: Seven year olds outperform nine year olds on mathematical equivalence problems. Developmental Psychology, 43, 687-695.

Bio

McNeil is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and a
Fellow of the Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University
of Notre Dame. She is an experimental psychologist who studies how
children think, learn, and solve problems in the domain of
mathematics. Her research involves several interrelated areas
including numerical representation, concept construction, symbolic
understanding, and problem solving. As an undergraduate she attended
Carnegie Mellon University, where she studied chemistry and developed
a passion for psychological science. She did her graduate work under
the direction of Martha Alibali at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison, where she had the great privilege of working with both
psychologists and mathematics education researchers to study students’
transition from arithmetic to algebra.

Before coming to Notre Dame, she worked for one year as a postdoctoral research associate at Yale
University. She has published in top journals such as Cognitive
Science, Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Journal of
Educational Psychology, and Journal for Research in Mathematics
Education. Her current research is funded by the U.S. Department of
Education, Institute of Education Sciences. Her goal is to contribute
to theoretical issues related to the construction and organization of
human knowledge, as well as practical issues related to learning and
instruction.