AUSTIN, Texas—Dr. Uri Treisman, director of The University of Texas at Austin’s Charles A. Dana Center, has been appointed to serve on the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council’s prestigious Strategic Education Research Plan (SERP) Committee. The committee is charged with designing and implementing a 15-year initiative to strengthen K-12 education in the United States.
The mission of the SERP project is to promote a research enterprise that has the capacity to offer teachers, school administrators and policy officials a knowledge base that supports efforts to improve K-12 education. The SERP initiative will look at ways that advances in research on cognition, development and learning can be incorporated into educational practice and ways to increase student engagement in the learning process and motivation to achieve.
Considered by U.S. Congress and the White House to be "advisers to the nation," the National Academy of Sciences and its sister organization, the National Research Council, provide a public service by working outside the framework of government to ensure independent advice on scientific issues that relate to policy decisions. They enlist committees of the nation’s top scientists and other experts to volunteer their time to study specific concerns.
Treisman, a professor in the department of mathematics, serves on three National Academy of Sciences committees and has long been an advocate for equity and excellence in education. For his studies at the University of California at Berkeley of the factors that support high achievement among minority students in calculus, he received the 1987 Charles A. Dana Award for Pioneering Achievement in American Higher Education. In July 1992, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. In December 1999, he was named as one of the outstanding leaders of higher education in the 20th century by the magazine Black Issues In Higher Education.
Treisman’s current research interests lie in education policy with a focus on the dynamics of education accountability and school finance systems.
The Charles A. Dana Center, a unit in UT Austin’s College of Natural Sciences, works to raise academic standards and improve student achievement in Texas and throughout the nation. The Center has a significant presence in more than 500 Texas schools and in a growing number of Texas communities. The Center’s networks have grown to include individuals and organizations working on issues of equity and excellence in education at a national level.
For more information, call Tracey Howerton, (512) 232-1437, or see the Charles A. Dana Center Web site at: <www.utdanacenter.org>.
