Patrick Kirkland

Patrick Kirkland, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of the practice in the Institute for Educational Initiatives and a faculty member of ACE Teaching Fellows.

Kirkland teaches elementary math methods and assessment courses for ACE Teaching Fellows and will teach education research methods courses in the Education, Schooling, and Society program. He also supervises a community of ACE Teaching Fellows. His research interests are in the area of children’s development of mathematical cognition in the context of K-12 classrooms. Specifically, he researches how students make sense of the relationship between whole numbers, fractions, and decimals, and operations in math.

His current research is funded by the National Science Foundation and examines how to best measure upper elementary and middle school students’ number sense. This research is in collaboration with the CLAD Lab and TutorND here on campus.

Kirkland is a former Burns fellow in the Notre Dame Program for Interdisciplinary Research (ND PIER) and a graduate of ACE Teaching Fellows. He taught middle school math and social studies in Savannah, GA before working as the associate director of academics for ACE Teaching Fellows.